Theseus

Summary

Theseus is the hero of Athens in Greek myth, son of Aegeus, its king, by Aethra, daughter of Pittheus, king of Troezen. Apollodorus says that Poseidon lay with his mother the same night, and his grandfather spread the story in Troezen that he was Poseidon's son. He is the one who killed the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete and then gathered the villages of Attica into one city. His fullest accounts are Plutarch's Life of Theseus and the Library ascribed to Apollodorus with its Epitome.

His story begins with a hidden token. Aegeus, who had no children, stopped with Pittheus at Troezen on his way back from Delphi, and Pittheus brought his daughter to him. When Aegeus suspected that she was with child by him, he hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock with a hollow just large enough for them, and told her: if you bear a son, and he grows strong enough to lift the rock and take what is under it, send him to me with these, in secret. When Theseus came of age he lifted the rock, took the sword and sandals, and chose the land road to Athens, which was full of robbers. He killed Periphetes the Clubman and took his club; he killed Sinis, who made passers-by bend pine trees that flung them to their death, in the same way; he seized Sciron by the feet and threw him into the sea as Sciron threw others; he lifted the wrestler Cercyon high and dashed him to the ground; and he killed Damastes, who stretched his guests or cut off their limbs to fit his bed.

At Athens Medea was Aegeus's wife. She persuaded him to beware of the stranger, so he sent him against the bull of Marathon, and Theseus killed it. Apollodorus says it was the bull Poseidon sent up from the sea for Minos, king of Crete, or the bull that carried Europa, which Heracles brought from Crete and let go, and which wandered until it reached Marathon. Then his father offered him a cup of poison Medea had given him; just as he was about to drink, Theseus drew the sword, Aegeus recognized it and dashed the cup from his hand, and Medea was driven out.

Athens paid a tribute to Minos, king of Crete: seven youths and seven girls sent without weapons as food for the Minotaur, after Minos's son Androgeus had died in Attica. The Minotaur was the son of Minos's wife Pasiphae. Minos had asked Poseidon to send up a bull from the sea and promised to sacrifice it; Poseidon sent it, Minos liked it, kept it in his herds and sacrificed another. Poseidon in anger made the bull savage and made Pasiphae desire it, and Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow covered with a cowhide. She went inside it and bore Asterius, who was called the Minotaur, with the face of a bull and the rest of his body human. Minos shut him in the labyrinth Daedalus built, from which no one who entered could find the way out.

When the third tribute came due, Theseus offered himself, or, some say, the lot fell on him. The ship sailed under a black sail, and his father told him to hoist a white one if he came back alive. In Crete Minos's daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and offered to help if he swore to take her to Athens as his wife; he swore. She asked Daedalus to show her the way out of the labyrinth, and at his suggestion she gave Theseus a thread. Theseus tied it to the door and went in drawing it behind him, found the Minotaur in the innermost part, killed him with blows of his fists, and came out following the thread. He sailed by night with Ariadne and the young people to Naxos, where Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne and took her. In his grief Theseus forgot to hoist the white sail; Aegeus saw the black sail from the Acropolis, thought his son was dead, threw himself down and died.

So Theseus became king of Athens. Plutarch says he went round the villages of Attica one by one, whose people lived scattered and sometimes fought each other, persuaded them to give up their separate council-halls and offices, built them a single council-hall where the upper city stands, named the city Athens and founded the Panathenaic festival. Later he went down with his friend Pirithous to the house of Hades to win Persephone as Pirithous's wife; Hades sat them on the Chair of Forgetfulness, they grew fast to it, Pirithous stayed bound for ever, and Heracles brought Theseus up. At the end of his life Menestheus drove him from Athens, and on the island of Scyros its king Lycomedes threw him down a cliff and killed him.

The idea his story turns on is the token. A sword and sandals under a rock let a father know his son, and the son escapes the poison. A thread in the hand lets the one who went in find the way out, and he escapes the labyrinth. A sail the son forgets makes the father read the wrong sign, and he dies. The hero who opened the land road to Athens and killed those who blocked it needed a woman's thread to get out of a man's building, and when he came home he gathered the scattered villages into one city with one council-hall.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Θησεύς, Theseus, ends in -eus, the ending of heroes' names as in Perseus, leaving Θησ-. The Greek essay reads it as dāsa, to tread hard and crush: Theseus the trampler, the crusher, the killer of the Minotaur. Lane has another root with the same meaning whose first letter answers Greek θ regularly: ṭāsa al-shayʾa, yaṭūsuhu, ṭaws, "he trod upon the thing and broke it", "like dāsahu". Arabic ṭ becomes Greek τ or θ, w is a long vowel, and s is s. So Theseus is al-ṭāʾis, the one who treads and breaks, which is what the story makes him: he lifted Cercyon and dashed him to the ground, threw Sciron by the feet, and killed the Minotaur with his fists rather than a sword. From dāsa itself comes madās, in the dictionary "a thing worn on the foot", a sandal, and the sandals were the first thing Theseus took from under the rock.

Linguistic Root

Theseus, ṭāsa and dāsa

Lane: ṭāsa al-shayʾa, yaṭūsuhu, ṭaws, "he trod upon the thing and broke it", and waṭs is like ṭaws. From the same root ṭāsa is also said of a face that grew beautiful and bright after illness, from ṭaws, the moon, and ṭawwasa is to go off no one knows where: mā adrī ayna ṭawwasa bihi, "I know not whither he has gone with it".

Lane also has dāsa, to tread upon a thing vehemently with the foot; dāsa al-ḥabb, to thresh grain; dawāʾis, the bulls that tread out the grain; dawwās, the lion that tramples its prey, and a courageous man who tramples whoever meets him in fight. Madās is a thing worn on the foot.

The sounds: Arabic ṭ answers Greek τ or θ once its emphasis is lost, s answers σ, w is a long vowel answered by η, and the name's ending drops. The essay's reading with d needs d to become θ, but Arabic d answers Greek δ, not θ. So the meaning is the essay's, the letter that keeps it regularly is the ṭ of ṭāsa, and the dictionary itself gives the two verbs one sense.

Plutarch gives a Greek explanation: Theseus was so named, some say, because the tokens of his recognition had been "placed" in hiding, and others say because Aegeus "acknowledged" him as his son at Athens; both are plays on the Greek verb τίθημι, to place. Close to this explanation in Arabic is dassa: in Lane, he hid it in the earth or beneath a thing, which is what Aegeus did with the sword and sandals. It is a reading proposed on the method; d and s join it to dāsa, and it is weakened by the fact that d does not become θ.

The essay gives a third reading, thassa, "to smash"; this root is found neither in Lane nor in the dictionaries gathered in the Arabic Lexicon.

The Minotaur and Minos

The Greek essay reads Μινώταυρος, Minotaur, as two words, Μίνως, Minos, and ταῦρος, bull: the bull of Minos, and says that thawr, bull, is a genuinely Semitic word. This is the firmest part of the name: Arabic thawr, Greek tauros and Latin taurus go back to one source in which th becomes t, and the project's laws of sound change give it their highest grade. In Lane the same root gives thāra, to rise up, be stirred and excited, which is what Poseidon did to Minos's bull when he made it savage.

The essay reads Minos from manna, in the sense "to decree and rule", so the Minotaur is "the ruler's bull". The sense the essay gives sits in Lane under m-n-y: manā, he decreed, determined; maniyya, a decreed event, death "because it is decreed"; al-manāyā, the fates. In the Library Minos is the lawgiver of Crete, and in the Odyssey he sits in the house of Hades with a golden sceptre giving judgment to the dead. He is the one who decrees, and his bull eats the young people decreed to be sent to him.

The essay reads Λαβύρινθος, Labyrinth, several ways: lubb, depth, with yarinnu, it echoes; or Canaanite labīra, lioness, with nath, cave; or lā with bayt, "no house", the no-place with no way out. The third is closest to the Library's description, a building "that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way".

Key Mythic Narratives

Minos's ring

Pausanias describes a painting on the wall of the sanctuary of Theseus at Athens: as Minos was taking the young people to Crete he wanted one of the girls, Theseus stopped him, and Minos insulted him and denied he was Poseidon's son, threw his ring into the sea and told him to bring it back if he was. Theseus came up from the sea with the ring and with a gold crown that Amphitrite, Poseidon's wife, had given him.

The Crane dance

Plutarch says that on the way home Theseus put in at Delos and danced with the young people round the altar a dance imitating the winding passages of the labyrinth, with turns and unwindings, which the Delians still danced in his time and called the Crane. In the Iliad there is a dancing floor that Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne, where youths and girls circle holding each other by the wrist.

Another version in Plutarch

Plutarch collects versions that take the monster out of the story. Philochorus says Taurus was the name of one of Minos's generals, hated for his harshness, and that Theseus beat him at wrestling in the Cretan games, Ariadne admired him, and Minos, pleased, gave back the young people and remitted the tribute. Cleidemus says that Deucalion, son of Minos, demanded that Athens hand over Daedalus; Theseus refused because Daedalus was his kinsman, built a fleet in secret, sailed to Crete with Daedalus as his guide, killed Deucalion at the gate of the labyrinth and made a truce with Ariadne. In the Iliad this Deucalion is Minos's son and the father of Idomeneus, a different man from the Deucalion of the flood. In the Epitome Theseus receives Phaedra, Ariadne's sister, as his wife from Deucalion.

Ariadne after Naxos

The versions of Ariadne's fate disagree. In the Odyssey Artemis killed her on the island of Dia on the witness of Dionysus. In the Theogony Dionysus took her as his wife and Zeus made her deathless and unageing. Ovid says Dionysus set her crown in the sky, where it became stars between the Serpent-holder and the Kneeler. Plutarch reports that some said she hanged herself when Theseus left her, and others that he left her because he loved another woman.

The bull from the sea a second time

The sea bull returns at the end of his story. Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, Theseus's son by the Amazon; he refused her, she accused him to his father, and Theseus prayed to Poseidon to destroy him. Poseidon sent a bull out of the surf while Hippolytus drove his chariot along the shore; the horses bolted and the young man was dragged to death in the reins.

His bones

Plutarch says that after the Persian wars the priestess at Delphi told the Athenians to bring back the bones of Theseus. Cimon found on Scyros a grave with the coffin of a man of great size, a bronze spear and a sword beside it, and carried them to Athens, where his tomb became a refuge for runaway slaves and for anyone weak who feared the powerful.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" does not read Theseus himself; it reads Zeus's upbringing in Crete as an image of the Minoan civilization, the oldest centre of civilization in Europe, from which order passed to the Greek mainland. On that reading the tribute of young people is a memory of a time when Athens was subject to Crete, and the Library itself says Minos was the first to rule the sea and extended his rule over most of the islands. Theseus's return with the young people, and then his gathering of the villages of Attica, become the beginning of Athens as a city that governs itself.

In the texts themselves the bull keeps returning: the sea bull that was not sacrificed, its son shut in the labyrinth, the bull of Marathon, and the bull that killed Hippolytus. The king who keeps back his god's share of the sacrifice pays for it from his own house, as the Athenians paid for the death of Minos's son with their own children.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Theseus kills at Marathon the bull of Crete that came out of the sea, and its son the Minotaur in the labyrinth, as Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven that Anu sent at Ishtar's request when Gilgamesh refused to marry her. In both stories the bull is a punishment from a god angry with a king, and in both the hero loses the person closest to him after the killing: Enkidu, Gilgamesh's companion, dies, and Aegeus, Theseus's father, dies.

His descent with Pirithous to the house of Hades, where they sat on the Chair of Forgetfulness, is one of the witnesses to the descent to the underworld, a descent from which the seeker does not bring back what he sought, and from which Theseus comes out by the hand of Heracles.

His gathering of the villages of Attica into one city, and his founding of the Isthmian games for Poseidon and of the Panathenaea, set him among the founders in Culture Heroes, as the people of Tyre held Melqart to be the founder of their city.