Sun Wukong and Hercules: What Myth Heroes Reveal About Chinese and Greco-Roman Values
Mythic heroes are rarely just entertainment. They’re cultural “containers” — characters that hold a civilisation’s anxieties about power, its hopes for justice, and its ideas about what makes a life meaningful. Put China’s most recognisable trickster-warrior, Sun Wukong, beside the Greco-Roman strongman hero, Hercules, and the contrast is striking. Both are violent, defiant, and larger-than-life. […]