The Choice of Hercules

July 15, 2025

by Stephen T. Messenger

There is a constant pull in life for us to take the easy path. All of us are susceptible to dangerous and attractive shortcuts that pull us down into the muck and mire of forgoing hard work and choosing comfort over distress. Yet, it’s often the ones who constantly fight to ignore the vices of life who find the joy of living lies through everyday struggles.

Ultimately, this choice is between easy and hard and often determines our level of growth.

The Cheating Scandal(s)

America sends our best and brightest high school graduates to military service academies every year to elevate our already amazing young men and women into our greatest officers. Yet even our top candidates are not without temptation.

This year, nearly 100 Air Force Academy cadets were investigated for cheating on a weekly knowledge test, with dozens admitting guilt and punished for this brazen act. Somewhere in the school year, our virtuous cadets were tempted somehow to take the easy road… and cheat.

Sadly, this is not shocking in military academies even though cadets are taught not to “lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” In March of 2020, 72 first-year West Point cadets cheated on a calculus exam. The following year, up to 105 midshipmen at the Naval Academy cheated on a physics exam with 18 of them expelled by the institution.

It’s so easy to accept answers when they are placed in front of us, shortcut a seldom used one-way road to save time, or use ChatGPT when we should be using our own brains. But it doesn’t have to be.  

The Choice of Hercules

Xenophon, a student of Socrates, recounts one of these difficult choices we all face in his book Memorabilia. In it, he describes Socrates telling the story of Hercules and his difficult choice.

It begins with Hercules standing at a fork in the road, trying to determine which path to take. Suddenly, two goddesses appear. One is a seductive and attractive woman named Kakia or happiness. This term to the Greek was considered eudaimonia or flourishing and living well. She represents vice and all the bad qualities we don’t want in ourselves.

Kakai butts in front of the other woman and promises Hercules a path of luxury, easy living, and a flourishing life off the backs of others. It was the shortcut to happiness, and all Hercules had to do was accept her offer and proceed to paradise.

The other woman patiently listened and spoke when it was her turn. She was plain-dressed and quiet, although naturally beautiful. Called Areté, meaning excellence, virtue, or the fulfillment of potential, her message was completely different. If Hercules followed her, he would live a life of hardship, challenge, and effort.

Not only that, his path would be more dangerous than he could imagine. He would be tested time after time, encounter loss, and suffer greatly. She states, “Nothing that is really good and admirable is granted by the gods without some effort and application.”

However, Hercules was offered the opportunity to encounter each challenge with the four stoic virtues of courage, self-discipline, wisdom, and justice. Instead of being handed happiness by Kakai, he would earn it through honor and effort.   

Of course, our hero chooses virtue over vice. He looks at Areté and proclaims, “I will take thee as my guide. The road of Labour and honest effort shall be mine.” And as promised, his road became hard.

Amidst his journey, he faced the 12 Labors of Hercules among other trials. These included tasks such as slaying the Lernaean Hydra, capturing the Erymanthian Boar, and stealing the Girdle of Hippolyta. One of his labors was in conquering the mundane, in this case, cleaning the Augean Stables. He was charged with getting rid of the dung of 3,000 oxen that had not been cleaned for 30 years. Think about that next time we don’t want to clean the toilet.

In each task, these labors challenged Hercules to use his brains, brawn, perseverance, and stoic virtues to overcome seemingly impossible challenges. After completing them, he tragically dies at the hands of his unwitting bride who mistakenly gave him a tunic dipped in the blood of the centaur Nessus, thinking it was a love potion. It was actually the blood of the Hydra killing Hercules.

However, Zeus halted Hercules’ death by sending a lightning bolt and bringing Hercules to live in Olympus with the Gods. Through Hercules’ struggles and sufferings, Zeus rewarded him with fame and immortality, more than he could have received through Kakai and vice.

We Learn through the Journey

There are no good shortcuts to life that help us improve as a person, yet we will constantly be tempted to take the easy road. The students who cheated on military academy exams may have passed the test if they weren’t caught, but they wouldn’t have gotten any smarter. ChatGPT could write this article for me, but then I wouldn’t be able to easily talk about it and remember it later. And Hercules could have listened to Kakai, but he would have been lost in mythology with no one wanting to write a story about him.

We all have a choice to take the easy or hard path. There are many tools to make our lives easier such as large language models, YouTube book summaries instead of reading, and weight loss drug supplements as opposed to working out and eating right. All three of these things will get us where we need to go, but it won’t improve our abilities to get there on our own.

Like Hercules, we need to write that paper, read that book, and hit the gym. When we choose virtue over vice and tackle the hard things in life, we will reap the reward of doing those hard things. It may not always be easy, but it is necessary to take the path less traveled.   

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