Painting on an Attic amphora, dating to about 520-510 B.C., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, representing Heracles capturing the hellish dog Cerberus. Heracles was the most well-known among the heroes of Greek mythology, and his deeds were widely diffused and popular, inspiring innumerable works of art. Born from the intercourse between Zeus and a mortal woman, Heracles was, at the end of his adventures, admitted in Olympus among the gods, acquiring thus a status different from that of every other Greek hero, at the same time man and god. Perhaps because of this dual nature, were attributed to him some of the traits that were subsequently ascribed to the Wild Man of a later age. Among them: the semi-divine status, an animal skin as clothing and as a way to take on himself the qualities of the wild beasts, the knotted stick, the extraordinary strength and the capacity to move between the world of the living and the world of the dead. If one of the declinations of the Medieval Wild Man is the Fool, Heracles presents an element of folly too. This is manifest in the episode in which he slaughtered his own children in a moment in which, deprived of wisdom by the goddess Hera, he was prey to a violent fury.

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herakles_Kerberos_Louvre_F204.jpg]