From a piece on baseball home run heroes in the Washington Post:

Ruth, who had out-homered entire teams -- season after season. Ruth, the hard-knock kid from a Baltimore orphanage who had become a superstar known by his first name, often prefaced with "the." The Babe. He was the "patron saint of American possibility," in the phrase of one biographer. His last name became an adjective, Ruthian, deriving from Herculean, to denote an achievement worthy of the ancient Greeks.

... I don't think "deriving" is the right word; "modelled on" or "in imitation of" seem to be rather more accurate ... [my, I've woken up in a pedantic mood]