### L2950 > it must have been particularly easy to make a connection between Melqart and Herakles. As Richard Miles has pointed out, they were both figures who straddle the divide between god and human: “Herakles, the son of Zeus and a human mother, had to earn the right to become a god himself through his heroic feats; Melqart, although a god, was also the first mythical king of Tyre and ancestor of its royal lineage.”51 Both were said to have been reborn through fire.52 And both were closely associated with colonization: as we have seen, Melqart is at the heart of several of the Phoenician foundation stories preserved in Greco-Latin texts—these are in fact the only myths associated with him—while Herakles prepares the way for Greek settlement by conquering large territories and founding the dynasties that found colonies, guaranteeing in both cases the new arrivals’ right to the land they seize.53 Indeed, it seems that the relationship between these two figures in the Greek imagination might have evolved in relation to the geography of migration west: Colette Jourdain-Annequin has argued very plausibly that some of Greek Herakles’s exploits, in particular stealing the cattle of Geryon and the apples from the Gardens of the Hesperides, acquired a more specific geography for Archaic and Classical Greek authors from centers of Melqart worship—Geryon was localized at Gadir, for instance, and the Gardens of the Hesperides at Lixus.54 Irad Malkin suggests furthermore that the particular association of Melqart with Tyrian colonies such as Carthage and Gadir “probably heightened Greek awareness of Herakles, whom they identified with Melqart, as a hero associated with, or even justifying, colonisation.” This is an interpretation that is totally new to me. It's a rabbit hole for sure, but interesting enough that I should follow up on it sometime. Maybe for Classical Wisdom? - [Location 2950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2950) - [[20 Information/26 Annotated/In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn#L2950|View in Vault]]