5. Hercules: Joves great son (8). The use of the patronymic ('Son of,' as in John-son, Robert-son, Richard-son) identifies Hercules as a god-man, the son of Zeus by a mortal mother (Alcmene). In the same way, Jesus, the son of Mary, was also the Son of God. The linkage thus created between Hercules and Christ is typological. Strictly speaking, a type is a person, thing, or action in the Old Testament that foreshadows the Messiah (Gk. Christos) in the New Testament, who is said to fulfill and clarify the meaning of the type. For example, in Paradise Lost, 12.240-41, "Moses in figure" foreshadows the Mediator, the God-man. In addition to biblically sanctioned types, Renaissance poets frequently treated classical fables as foreshadowing New Testament truths. Hercules rescuing Alcestis and Orpheus, who almost rescued Eurydice, his wife, from the Underworld, were favorite subjects for typological interpretation. Alexander Ross is typical of Renaissance mythographers when he reads Orpheus as a type of the New Adam (Christ), at once suggestively like and crucially unlike the dying and rising Son of God: Christ is "the true Orpheus; . . . [he] went down to hell to recover the Church his Spouse, who had lost herself . . . among the Grass and Flowers of pleasure, [and] was stung by that old serpent the Devil." (Mystogogus Poeticus, p. 338.)