Similarities Between Superman And Greek Mythology

Legacy of Greek Mythology: Comic heroes and their place in modern life

At present time if somebody asks a little boy “Who is the strongest and most powerful hero on the Earth?”, with a ninety percent chance the answer will be Superman, if someone would ask the same question to a Greek boy about three thousand years ago, with a ninety percent chance, the answer would be Heracles or Achilles. No doubt that each and every time we need someone to align on and a role model to follow. But a curious thing to notice is why there are so many parallels between comic book heroes and Greek Demi-Gods, as if Jungian unconsciousness repeats similar stories again and again, despite the location, culture and time. From time to time the history tends to repeat

Heracles could be represented by Captain America, both are patriotic humans, that became Gods, they went through a lot of humiliating tasks and experienced a lot of pain before becoming Gods. Tony Stark is an incarnation of Daedalus, both are brilliant minds that projected incredible engineering constructions and “gave birth” to monsters like Minotaur and Ultron. On the other hand, looks like DC Comics wants to implement completely opposite approach and mentality. Apparently Superman is parallel to Zeus, leader and representative of his “community”, Batman is Hades, who is consistently surrounded by death and darkness, he is also living underground in the Batcave, similar to the king of the underworld. And such similarities conveniently permeating the plot of many comic

The collective image is built from us, integrating all the characteristics into our behavior, personalities and ethics. So simply to say, we like them because they inspire us to do greater things. Of course it has been very less time to consider this genre as significant as Greek mythology, but it may turn out that next generations pose their own mythology, with superheroes becoming the legends, same like Heracles and Theseus, similar like now we are drawing our inspiration from them. And who knows, maybe someday we will have an event with the same scope as Olympic Games, which came from festivals in honor of Zeus and Olympic Gods, that captures the world every four years. After all the discussion it turned out that there is not such a big difference between three thousand years old Geek boy and modern kid enjoying the next movie about Iron Man, we still need things to be explained in the simplest way, that is why we came back to the most efficient method, proven by hundreds of centuries ago, mythology just changed its appearance, but still remains a very important aspect of our