Loraux focuses on what the myth would have meant to a Greek audience. She explores everything in the myth of the virile Greek hero, Heracles, that suggests femininity. Her approach discounts critics from Aristotle onward who have seen the myth as a composite, unified solely by the name of the hero. Loraux believes instead that there is a unity to Heracles. She proposes to define the heroic temperament as unitary through all its contradictions. She reviews the various Heracles legends, emphasizing the obvious ambivalences which characterize the hero: his misogyny and his appetite for women; his heroic exploits and his predilections for soft beds and hot baths; his invincibility as against his sufferings and insoluble quandaries. Loraux's