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Thanks, mjdemo and others for this excellent thread. I'd felt there was deeper reason to Don Gately's cleaning shit than the obvious repetition of the rot/waste theme, but couldn't put my finger on it. Love the parallels with the Aegean stables and borrowed chariot!
I pulled Edith Hamilton's Mythology from my shelf and found the following on Hercules:
"The greatest hero of Greece was Hercules . . . Intelligence did not figure largely in anything he did and was often conspicuously absent. . . His intellect was not strong. His emotions were. . . . This power of deep feeling in a man of his tremendous strength was oddly endearing, but it worked immense harm, too. He had sudden outbursts of furious anger which were always fatal to the often innocent objects. When the rage had passed and he had come to himself he would show a most disarming penitence and agree humbly to any punishment it was proposed to inflict on him. Without his consent he could not have been punished by anyone -- yet nobody ever endured so many punishments. He spent a large part of his life expiating one unfortunate deed after another and never rebelling against the almost impossible demands made upon him. Sometimes he punished himself when others were inclined to exonerate him. . . . His thinking was limited to devising a way to kill a monster which was threatening to kill him. Nevertheless he had true greatness. Not because he had complete courage based upon overwhelming strength, which is merely a matter of course, but because, by his sorrow for wrongdoing and his willingness to do anything to expiate it, he showed greatness of soul."
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