Heracles translates as "glory of Hera" — Hera-kleos. The man Hera spent his entire life trying to destroy was named, according to the Delphic Oracle in Apollodorus, specifically to appease her. That naming was an attempt at reconciliation that clearly didn't work. The irony was built into him from birth.
Homer mentions Heracles in the Iliad as a figure from a previous, more violent age — someone the current heroes measure themselves against but can't quite reach. But Heracles goes back even further. Mycenaean Linear B tablets from roughly 1400 BCE reference figures with Heracles-type attributes, though scholars still debate the exact connection. What's certain is that by Homer's time, Heracles was already ancient.
People assume the twelve labours were always "the twelve." They weren't. Early Greek sources give varying numbers and different tasks. Pindar in the fifth century BCE lists only some of them. The complete, fixed list of twelve doesn't appear until Apollodorus around the first or second century CE — roughly seven hundred years after the myth started circulating. For most of Greek history, the labours were flexible. Storytellers added and removed tasks depending on what the story needed to do.
Homer, Iliad (8th century BCE) — Earliest literary reference to Heracles
Pindar, Olympian Odes (5th century BCE) — Partial list of labours
Apollodorus, Library (1st-2nd century CE) — First complete canonical list of twelve labours
Mycenaean Linear B tablets (circa 1400 BCE) — Possible proto-Heracles references
The name itself carries deeper roots. Scholars including Martin West have traced direct lines of influence from Near Eastern epic tradition — stories like Gilgamesh — into Greek mythology. Heracles isn't purely a Greek invention. He's the endpoint of a very long tradition of stories about men who are more than human and less than gods.
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