9. Temple of Hercules

The temple of Hercules is the second largest temple in Dodona (after the temple of Zeus). It was built in the years of King Pyrrhus, who wanted to stress his family connection to the great mythical hero. He claimed to be a descendant of Hercules through Lanassa, his great-granddaughter. She also connected Pyrrhus with another great hero, Achilles. That’s because she was the wife of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, who came to Epirus in force at the end of the Trojan War, became master of the land and started the royal dynasty. With this “massaging” of the mythical past, Pyrrhus suddenly acquired an ancestry as glorious as that of Alexander the Great.

The Molossians were an ancient Greek tribe that inhabited the region of Epirus. Their land had a certain wild majesty but to urban dwellers must have appeared frigid, hard, and barren. The first king to become known to the city-states of the south was Tharyps, who was educated in Athens. It was during his reign that the Molossians gained control of Dodona from the Thesprotians to the west. Gradually, they established a federal union (koinon) with a king as titular head. They turned their attention towards the Greek states to the south; gradually their state came to encompass most of Epirus and under the leadership of Pyrrhus they expanded rapidly towards all directions.

During the heyday of their power, the Molossians were a force to be reckoned with. Their kings and armies influenced political and military developments throughout Greece; and so did their pets. The Spartans came to the oracle to consult Zeus on a military matter. The ambassadors had set up a vessel which contained the lots when, all of a sudden, a monkey that the king of the Molossians kept as a pet upset the lots and scattered them in every direction. The priestess told the Spartans to forget all about victory and think only about their safety. It was an advice that the last kings of the Molossians failed to heed; they allied themselves with the Macedonians to defeat the Romans. Aemilius Paulus defeated them, destroyed 70 cities in Molossia and took 150,000 Epirotes as slaves.