High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In Greek mythology, Heracles or Herakles, meaning "glory of Hera", or "glorious through Hera", Alcides or Alcaeus, was a divine hero, the son of Zeus and Alcmene , foster son of Amphitryonand great-grandson (and half-brother) of Perseus.He was the greatest of the Greek heroes, a paragon of masculinity, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae and a champion of the Olympian orderagainst chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modernWest, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman Emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian,often identified themselves.