Antaeus - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

• In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Antaeus is shown among the giants half-frozen up to their torsos at the edge of the Circle of Treachery. He lowers Dante and Virgil into the Circle of Treachery.
• In Samuel Butler's novel The Way of All Flesh, Ernest Pontifex's aunt Alethea encourages him to learn carpentry "as a means of kissing the soil should his Hercules ever throw him;" that is, to learn a trade to live off of in case he chooses not to pursue the object of his studies, theology.
• In the made for TV movie Hercules and the Circle of Fire, Hercules fights Antaeus (who is depicted as a rocky half-giant).
• In the TV miniseries Hercules, Antaeus is one of the hero's main antagonists.
• Antaeus appears in the Hercules episode "Hercules and the Hostage Crisis" voiced by Miguel Ferrer. He is depicted as a Half-Titan/Half-Giant who led the terrorist organization P.O.O.T.L.s ("People's Organization of Titanic Liberators") and led them into holding the Prometheus Academy hostage. Antaeus planned to capture Hercules so that he can use him as bait for Zeus and get him to free the Titans.
• The story is used in Seamus Heaney's poem "Hercules and Antaeus", published in "North" (1975).
• Antaeus appears in the film Hercules Unchained. However, Hercules does not kill him.
• Antaeus appears in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series where he appeared in Battle of the Labyrinth. He ran an arena where he challenged anyone to a fight. Percy Jackson kills Antaeus by hanging him from a chandelier and stabbing him in the stomach. There was also a reference that Antaeus was a son of Gaia.
• Plato uses Antaios as a metaphor: You seem to me to play rather the role of Antaios; for you do not let anyone go who approaches you until you have forced him to strip and wrestle with you in argument.
• Socrates also had a Antaios metaphor: Your comparison with . . . Antaios pictures my complaint admirably; only I am a more stubborn combatant than they; for many a Herakles . . . strong men of words, have fallen in with me and belabored me mightily."
• Antaeus is a short story by Borden Deal. It is named after the mythological figure Antaeus, a giant who was unconquerable as long as he touched the ground.