T HESEUS, THE K ING We left Theseus on board ship with his thirteen compatriots, staring up at Daedalus and Icarus in flight. What with his gnawing guilt at the abandonment of Ariadne and feelings of astonishment and dismay at the sight of Icarus falling to his death, Theseus’s mind was fully occupied as the ship sailed homeward towards Athens. So wrapped in thought were he and the sea-captain that even as the ship came within sight of Piraeus harbour something very important slipped both their minds. They entirely forgot their promise to pull down the black sails and hoist white ones to let Aegeus know that they were sailing back in triumph. The king had stood every day on the cliffs waiting for a sight of the ship. Now he saw on the horizon the familiar outline of an Athenian vessel. It was beyond question the ship of his son Theseus, but what colour were the sails? The ship was so far away. Against the white of the sky the sails looked black, but perhaps because they were in silhouette … no … that was too much to hope for. The closer the ship sailed, the clearer it was that its sails were as black as death. His brave, foolish, newly found son was dead. That prophecy from the oracle: Aegeus must not loosen the bulging mouth of the wineskin until he has reached the heights of Athens, or he will die of grief. Aegeus finally understood what it had meant. He should have gone straight from Delphi to Athens all those years ago. Instead he had gone to Troezen where he had somehow found himself in bed with Aethra. He had loosened his bulging wineskin. He had fathered Theseus, who had given him a brief time of joy, but now – it was true, the oracles were always right – he found himself overcome by mortal grief. With a cry of despair Aegeus threw himself to his death in the sea below, the sea that ever since has been called, in his honour, the Aegean. It is hard to know for sure what kind of a king Theseus was. Later, the Athenians, who wrote most of the history that has come down to us, so revered their Founder King that, if we are to believe them, he was the inventor, not only, as we have discovered, of wrestling and bull-leaping, but of democracy, justice and all good government too, as well as being a paragon of intelligence, wit, insight and wisdom – qualities that the Athenians (much to the contempt of their neighbours) believed uniquely exemplified their character and culture. It is generally accepted that he merged the smaller regional and provincial units (known as demes) of Attica under the rule of the central Athenian polis or city state,fn20 a system that served as the model for Ancient Greek administrative government up to the historical period. What is certainly clear is that Theseus was very much a human being, with all the weaknesses, strengths and inconsistencies that the condition confers upon us. Much of what followed in his life after the Minotaur was a result of one of the great male friendships in Greek myth, that between Theseus and Pirithous.fn21 As with the later bromance of Achilles and Patroclus, there is a suggestion in some Greek sources that there may have been a sexual element in the relationship, but if there was it had no effect on the womanizing and philandering propensities of either man. Pirithous, King of the Lapiths, was a son of Dia and Zeus. Dia had been the wife of Ixion. It seems hypocritical that Zeus might bind Ixion to a wheel of fire for attempting to seduce Hera and then set about ravishing the man’s wife, but Zeus was never anything if not Zeus. In the form of a stallion he had his way with Dia who bore Pirithous, who in adulthood earned a reputation for being a fine warrior and, perhaps unsurprisingly, horseman.fn22 Hearing of the equally excellent reputation of Athens’ new king and wanting to test it, Pirithous raided Marathon, coming away with a herd of Theseus’s most prized cattle.fn23 Outraged, Theseus made his way to Larissa, the capital of the Lapith kingdom, and tracked Pirithous down, meaning if not to kill him, at least to teach him a very severe lesson. But the moment they met they decided that they liked each other and instead of fighting swore eternal friendship. The bond was soon tested, for Pirithous was not without challengers to his throne in Thessaly. The centaurs, half-man half-horse, felt that as descendants of Ixion they had a greater right to rule than Pirithous.fn24 They had been given Mount Pelion as a base, but they took this as an insult and demanded more. It all came to a head during the wedding of Pirithous and his bride, Hippodamiafn25. Out of diplomatic necessity Pirithous had made sure that the centaurs were invited, but as milk drinkers they were unused to the wine which flowed during the feast. Its effect caused them to start behaving abominably.fn26 One of them, EURYTION, tried to rape the bride Hippodamia herself while the rest of the centaurs pushed themselves on all the women and boys present. Pirithous and Theseus, an honoured guest at the wedding, fought back. A rather touching side story in this otherwise grim and frenzied fight (sometimes called the Centauromachy or ‘Battle of the Centaurs’fn27) involves the sad end of a Lapith called Caeneus. He had been born a woman, Caenis. She was spotted one day by Poseidon who liked what he saw and took it. Entirely delighted by the experience, the grateful god offered Caenis any wish. She had taken no pleasure at all in the violation and asked that she might be turned into a man and thus avoid any indignity of that kind in the future. Poseidon, perhaps abashed, not only granted this wish but also bestowed invulnerable skin upon her – now him. Caeneus was present at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia and fought the centaurs alongside Pirithous and Theseus. One of the centaurs, Latreus, mocked him for having once been a woman. Caeneus struck Latreus but was himself, due to his invulnerability, unharmed by a furious volley of counterstrikes. The other centaurs, discovering that their arrows and spears were bouncing off Caeneus’s impenetrable hide, resorted to heaping stones over him and hammering him into the ground with pine trees until he died by suffocation in the earth. Despite the loss of Caeneus, Pirithous and his Lapiths finally prevailed. The surviving centaurs galloped away, defeated and dejected. Among the surviving centaurs who galloped away, defeated and dejected, was Nessus, who was fated to be Heracles’ bane. fn28 Peace having now descended on Thessaly, Pirithous was able to help his friend Theseus acquire a wife. They chose the Amazon warrior ANTIOPE, sister of Hippolyta, whose war belt had been fatally wrested from her by Heracles during his Labours.fn29 Although Antiope was forcibly abducted it is generally believed that after Theseus installed her as his queen and wife in Athens she grew to love him. She bore him a son, Hippolytus, whom they named in honour of her sister, the great Amazonian queen. The Amazons had other ideas. Marriage to a man was a betrayal of everything these proud, misandrous warrior women stood for.fn30 They combined forces in a sustained attack on Athens known as the Attic War. The Amazons were defeated at the final battle on the Areopagus, the Hill of Mars.fn31 During that fight Antiope was badly wounded. A fellow Amazon called MOLPADIA, although fighting on the opposite side, put her out of her agony with a swift arrow through the neck. Theseus, seeing this, killed Molpadia. Her tomb, like so many mythic sites, was visited by the traveller Pausanias, whose observations often form a pleasing bridge between myth, legend and something close to history. The Attic war, like Heracles’ ravaging of Hippolyta and her band during the Ninth Labour, is part of the wider Amazonomachy, yet another -machy, yet another taming of the wild in which the Greeks characterised themselves as ridding the world of the more barbarous, monstrous and uncivilised elements that threatened, like encroaching swarms, their sense of harmony and the potential graces of ordered civilisation.fn32 This ‘war with the Amazons’, together with the CENTAUROMACHY (the battle between the Lapiths and centaurs at Pirithous’s wedding), the TITANOMACHY (the war of the Olympian gods against their Titan forebears)fn33 and the GIGANTOMACHY (the war of the gods against the giants, in which Heracles fought so valiantly),fn34 formed some of the favourite subjects of Greek painting and sculpture.fn35 Collectively their themes are best understood in symbolic terms, as representations of the way the Greeks characterised themselves as the champions of order and civilization against the chaotic hordes of barbarism and the monstrous. Which also makes them narrative playings-out of the struggle to tame the savage instincts, the dark and dangerous elements of human nature. The Amazons defeated, a kind of midlife crisis overtook Pirithous and Theseus. They decided to choose new brides for themselves. Their choices were wild and calamitous. His new friend helped Theseus abduct the young Helen of Sparta,fn36 while for himself Pirithous decided it would be amusing to have Persephone, Queen of the Underworld for a wife. When he proposed the insane idea of descending into the realm of the dead and snatching Persephone from under the very nose of her husband Hades, Theseus the hero, Theseus the wise, Theseus the clever, Theseus the great king and counsellor nodded his head vigorously. ‘Why not? Sounds like fun.’ The pair went to the spot that Orpheus had chosen for his descent, Tainaron on the southern tip of the Peloponnese, also called Cape Matapan, and boldly made their way down through the caves, passageways and galleries into the kingdom of the dead. Whether Pirithous imagined that his rough soldierly charm would win Persephone over or whether they planned to take her by force of arms is not known. The expedition was predictably disastrous. An unamused Hades cast them into stone chairs, their naked buttocks stuck to the seats, their legs bound by living snakes. There they would have stayed until the crack of doom had not Heracles, as we have seen, happened past them on his way to parley with Hades for the loan of Cerberus.fn37 In order to release Theseus, Heracles had to jerk him quite violently from his seat. Theseus was pulled free but his buttocks were left behind. It was as if they had been superglued to the stone of the chair. Athenian representations of the older, post-Hades Theseus, portray him as apygous, essentially arseless.fn38 Theseus returned to the upper world to discover that Helen had been rescued by her brothers, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, also known as the Dioscuri.fn39 Chastened, he chose a new bride for himself. His eye fell on PHAEDRA, the younger sister of Ariadne. Perhaps she reminded Theseus of his first love, perhaps he felt an alliance with her might repair the old wrong of leaving Ariadne on Naxos, perhaps it was nothing more than a political move. The motives of Theseus seem always the hardest to read of any of the heroes. Minos, the old enemy of Athens was dead, of course, boiled alive in Sicily. His son DEUCALION had inherited the throne and – presumably because he knew that Athens was now stronger than Crete and also saw the value of an alliance – approved and even helped arrange the marriage, all thoughts of Theseus’s abandonment of his sister Ariadne and slaughtering of his half-brother the Minotaur put aside. Phaedra and Theseus had two sons together, Acamas and Demophon, who would grow up to feature in a touching and honourable cameo in the Trojan War. Meanwhile, what of Hippolytus, Theseus’s son by Antiope? He had been sent to Theseus’s old home of Troezen. He grew into a handsome, athletic young man, whose greatest passion was hunting. His devotion to Artemis, the goddess of the chase and the chaste, was equalled by his contempt for Aphrodite and the distractions of love. No man or woman interested him. Aphrodite, of course, did not take kindly to being ignored and the revenge she prepared for this insolent young man’s neglect of her altars and practices was terrible indeed. When his father Theseus and step-mother Phaedra visited Troezen, Hippolytus welcomed them dutifully. Theseus and Hippolytus hit it off at once. Greek myth is full of fathers who kill sons and sons who kill fathers so the mutual bond of affection and admiration that blossomed between these two seems especially remarkable. During the visit they spent all day and every day in each other’s company. Hippolytus barely noticed Phaedra. She, however, noticed him. She slowly became obsessed and one night visited him and declared her love.fn40 With a touch more horror and visible disgust than was wise or tactful, Hippolytus rejected her advances. As with Stheneboea and Bellerophon and Potiphar’s wife and Joseph, the scorned and humiliated Phaedra cried rape to Theseus who cursed his son and called on his father Poseidon to punish him. As Hippolytus was driving his chariot along the shore one morning the god sent one of his great bulls from the sea which maddened the horses. The boy was trampled to death. Phaedra, on hearing this, took her own life. The goddess Artemis appeared to Theseus and explained that his son had been innocent all along and that the tragedy had been the result of spurned love and Aphrodite’s resentment. Exiled from his kingdoms of Athens and Troezen for his role, however unwitting, in the deaths of his son and wife, wretched, bitter, desolated and drained of all passion and purpose, Theseus came to a bathetic and pathetic end. A guest of King Lycomedes of Skyros, Theseus was pushed by his host over a cliff to his death. The cause of the argument between them is lost to us. Cimon, a historical king of Athens many many years later, invaded Skyros and brought Theseus’s body back to the city that he done so much to make great. Lycomedes achieved greater fame for the part he was to play in the upbringing of Achilles. A fine statue of a naked Theseus stands proudly today in Athens’ central place of assembly, the city’s hub, Syntagma Square. Even today he is a focus of Athenian identity and pride. The ship he brought back from his adventures in the Labyrinth of Crete remained moored in the harbour at Piraeus, a visitor attraction right up to the days of historical ancient Athens, the time of Socrates and Aristotle. Its continuous presence there for such a long time caused the Ship of Theseus to become a subject of intriguing philosophical speculation. Over hundreds of years, its rigging, its planks, its hull, deck, keel, prow, stern and all its timbers had been replaced so that not one atom of the original remained. Could one call it the same ship? Am I the same person I was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.fn41 It is appropriate that Theseus should be linked in this way with the Athens of logic, philosophy and open enquiry for he was the hero who more than any other embodied the qualities Athenians most prized. Like Heracles, Perseus and Bellerophon before him, he helped cleanse the world of dangerous monsters, but the way he did so employed wit, intelligence and fresh ways of thinking. He was fallible and flawed, as the all the heroes were, but he stood for something great in us all. Long may he stand in Syntagma Square and long may he stand high in our regard.
