The disquiet that had been spreading could no longer be denied, the security of the nobles was undermined, no prayers or parades could wring devotion from the populace. The torturers were still raging, and the dungeons still filling up with any people arbitrarily suspected of dissatisfaction. But the whereabouts of the real prisoners were shown one morning, before sunrise, when Heracles arrived in Thebes, accompanied by a gigantic hound, at whose howling all those who had a solid house crept under their beds, while those in shacks and those who slept outdoors pricked up their ears and dashed toward Heracles as if called by a cheery trumpet. The guardian of infernal order, who had been depicted as unassailable since time immemorial, had been pulled out of the earthly depths by Heracles, easily, with a song, it was said, during his last raid into the interior of the world structure, and in the marketplace, which had been abandoned by the warriors of the upper ranks, he showed the maids and farmhands, the craftsmen and the day laborers, and the loitering rank and file: Cerberus, the shabby cur, who, upon viewing the vast assembly pulled in his tail and started whimpering. Heracles had also brought a caged eagle, a further celebrity in the system of coercion and menace; the eagle had served to torment the defiant, the valiant, the self-confident, to devour the livers of the rebellious, over and over, and now all this, as the inhabitants of Thebes could see, was about to end. They saw what scabby scraggy legs had propped up the reign of fraud and lies and how wretchedly the feathers dangled on the bird that had only just been throning proudly over Prometheus, how dull the membranes were that had drawn over the bird’s eyes, which had otherwise glittered so dangerously. An end thus to fettering anyone to anguish for thinking new thoughts, everything was open in Thebes, in Mycenae, for the age of justice. But, we wanted to know, did the inhabitants manage to spread so much conviction that the aristocrats in the palaces, in the patrician buildings, came crawling on their knees, begging for mercy, were they not, after a little doubting and waffling and not even necessarily a betrayal, but rather that routine tolerance, given a chance to defend themselves, to strike back. For it was not peace that now followed, we would, after all, have heard about it; instead new campaigns were launched, wars, vaster than ever. From now on, however, Heracles could not be imagined anywhere but on the side of the enslaved, said Heilmann amid the screeching of the wheels of a packed trolley, which, coming from Alexanderplatz, turned into Rosenthaler Strasse; Heracles, Heilmann went on, had made it clear that all magic spells had been broken, all legendary creatures subdued, and it was a mortal who could perform such feats. His apprenticeship was over, everything he now did would be marked by tremendous changes, he already had powerful allies, including the carrier of the firmament. And yet, said Heilmann after a while, as we entered the worn building entrance, which was shored up by buckling titans, and yet Heracles perished in dreadful agony, no one managed to grab the shirt soaked in Nessus’s poisoned blood, tear it from his skin, stop his pain-induced madness, and prevent him from throwing himself into the ever-burning pyre on Mount Oite. (The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1)