Theseus

Theseus was born at Troezen, the son of Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus. The tradition gives him two fathers at once and never decides between them: Aegeus, king of Athens, who passed through Troezen on his way back from the oracle, and Poseidon, who lay with Aethra that same night. Before leaving, Aegeus hid his sword and his sandals under a rock and told Aethra to show them to the boy on the day he was strong enough to lift it. He was, and with those two tokens for his only credentials he chose to reach Athens by land rather than by sea, which was the short and safe way, precisely because the long one was held by bandits and he wanted to measure himself against them. There were six, and he killed each by that man's own method. At Epidaurus, Periphetes, son of Hephaestus, called the Clubman after the iron club he struck with. On the Isthmus of Corinth, Sinis the Pine-bender, who made travellers hold down bent pines and tore them apart when the trees sprang back. At Crommyon, the sow called Phaea, which bore the name of the old woman who had bred it. On the Scironian rocks in Megarian territory, Sciron, who forced passers-by to wash his feet and kicked them into the sea, where a huge turtle was waiting. At Eleusis, Cercyon, who challenged travellers to wrestle and killed them wrestling. And last, Damastes, whom they call Procrustes, who kept two beds by the road, one short and one long, and fitted every guest to the wrong one.

The feat he is known for begins as a tribute: Athens sends seven youths and seven maidens to Crete for the Minotaur, shut in the labyrinth Daedalus built for Minos. Theseus volunteers among the victims and promises his father to come back under white sails if he wins. On Crete, Ariadne, daughter of Minos, falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread: you tie one end at the entrance and unwind as you go, which is the only thing that lets you get out again. Apollodorus is blunt about how he kills the Minotaur: with his fists. Other versions put a sword in his hand, but the oldest gives him no weapon at all, and the detail is not a small one, because what solves the labyrinth is the thread and what solves the beast is a pair of hands. He follows the thread out, takes Ariadne with him and abandons her asleep on Naxos, at a god's command or of his own accord depending on who is telling it. On the way home he forgets to change the sails; Aegeus, watching the horizon, sees the black and throws himself into the sea that has borne his name ever since. The other great adventure he shares with Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, to whom he was bound by oath. They went down to Hades to carry off Persephone, and Hades received them as a host receives guests: by inviting them to sit. The seat was the Chair of Forgetfulness, and they grew fast to it, held by coils of serpents. Heracles tore Theseus loose; Pirithous he could not move, and there Pirithous stayed.

With Aegeus dead, Theseus reigns at Athens and does the thing that earns him a place in the history of the city rather than in the history of monsters: he gathers the scattered communities of Attica into a single polis, dissolves their local councils and, according to Plutarch, offers them a government without a king in which he would be only commander in war and guardian of the laws. He gave that union a festival, the Metoecia, on the sixteenth of Hecatombaeon, and with it instituted the Panathenaea and the Oschophoria; and he re-established the Isthmian games in honour of Poseidon, in emulation of what Heracles had done at Olympia. The Eleusinian Mysteries, sometimes credited to him, are not his: they belong to Demeter and were administered by the line of the Eumolpidae. He also warred against the Amazons, and by their queen, Antiope or Hippolyta depending on the source, he had Hippolytus. His end has nothing heroic about it: driven out of Athens by the intrigues of his rivals, he took refuge on Scyros, where King Lycomedes led him to the top of a cliff and pushed him off. Centuries later Cimon took the island, searched for the grave and dug up the coffin of an enormous man with a bronze spear and a sword beside it; he carried the bones to Athens on his trireme and the city received them with festival. From that his cult was born, and the Theseion was a sanctuary for slaves and for the poor. That is the figure Attic theatre and pottery keep repeating: not the strongest, but the one who puts things in order, the model of what Athens wanted to believe it was.