As myth has it, Hercules had to complete 12 heroic labors to be absolved of guilt and to become immortal. A recent discovery picks up the story, long after the Greek and Roman tales concluded, to tell us a new version of his afterlife.
A likeness of the demigod of strength — who, the story goes, strangled a lion, decapitated a nine-headed underwater snake and captured a man-eating boar, among other feats — was lying at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Or at least its head was.
A team of experts searching through a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, an excavation effort that took place from May 23 to June 15, dredged up what researchers believe is the marble head of a Hercules statue from ancient Rome dating back about 2,000 years.
