Brett Ratner’s new take on the Hercules myth reimagines the demigod Hercules as a muscly mortal who captains a troop of mercenaries. Ratner’s primary source for the story comes from the late Steve Moore’s comic book series The Thracian Wars, which focuses on Hercules as a troubled Bronze Age military commander in barbaric Thrace. As 21st-century readers, most of us are probably used to seeing Hercules’s adventures take place in Mediterranean Europe; ten out of the fifteen English-speaking and big budget films featuring Hercules from the 1930s onward set the hero’s story in regions like Thebes, Crete, and Troy. Africa is one of the unlikeliest places we’d expect to have a ‘Hercules’ tradition but according to local legend, the fabled strongman once spent a harrowing night sleeping in a series of caves outside of the Moroccan city of Tangier.

These spacious caverns, located near the Cape of Spartel about fourteen kilometres from Tangier, were apparently Hercules’s last places to relax before he began his twelve labours, which were assigned as atonement for his sins. About a half-hour from the Grand Socco medina, these hidden wonders are open to the public and are usually populated by a few street merchants and entertainers.

The caves are only a third of the reason why Tangier is an appropriate candidate for the main Maghreb city of Hercules’s heroic deeds. Classical writers believed that Tangier itself was founded by Hercules’s rival, Antaeus, who Hercules mortally wounded during a wrestling match on his way to the Garden of the Hesperides. The creation of the rocky Pillars of Hercules, which flank the nearby Strait of Gibraltar were also attributed to the mythical son of Zeus.

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