Aegeus

Also Known As: Greek Aigeus; king of Athens, son of Pandion, father of Theseus by Aethra of Troezen
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is the childless king who carried a riddling oracle from Delphi, fathered a son he did not raise, and died believing that son was dead.
Role in Mythos: Aegeus is the hinge of the Theseus cycle, since his visit to Troezen, his tokens under the rock, his marriage to Medea and his fatal watch for a white sail frame the hero’s whole youth.
Relation to Humans: He paid the Athenian tribute of youths and maidens to Minos and was blamed for it by his own people. The Athenians later honoured him with a hero-shrine and counted him among the heroes whose names the city’s tribes carried.

In the centre of a red-figure drinking cup made in Athens around 430 BC, a goddess sits on the tall tripod of Delphi. She holds a shallow offering bowl in one hand and a sprig of laurel in the other, and a king stands before her waiting for an answer. The painter named her Themis. The king is Aegeus of Athens, and the answer he is about to hear will give him the son he wants and, a generation later, the death he does not. The cup, attributed to the Codrus Painter, is in the Antikensammlung in Berlin, and the sides of it carry the hunt of the Calydonian boar, as if the painter wanted a louder story around the quiet one.

Aegeus spent most of his life waiting for something. Pausanias, the traveller of the second century AD, says his father Pandion was driven out of Athens by the Metionidae and died in exile at Megara, and that Pandion’s sons came back, threw out the usurpers, and gave the throne to Aegeus as the eldest. Apollodorus names the brothers as Pallas, Nisus and Lycus, all born at Megara, and passes on a rumour that Aegeus was really the son of a man called Scyrius, passed off by Pandion as his own. The sons of Pallas made sure that rumour never died. In Plutarch they call Aegeus an adopted son of Pandion with no blood of Erechtheus in him at all. Lycus, Pausanias heard, fled from Aegeus to the Termilae, who took the name Lycians from him.

The kingdom was secure. The family was not. Apollodorus gives Aegeus two wives, Meta, daughter of Hoples, and then Chalciope, daughter of Rhexenor, and no child by either. Plutarch counts fifty sons of Pallas alone, waiting for their childless uncle to die, and says they despised him for it. Pausanias records a detail that is almost tender: Aegeus founded the Athenian cult of the Heavenly Aphrodite because he believed that his own childlessness, and the ruin of his sisters Procne and Philomela at the hands of the Thracian king Tereus, came from her anger.

So he went to Delphi. The god answered in the voice oracles keep for kings. In Plutarch’s version the priestess told him, “Loose not the wine-skin’s jutting neck, great chief of the people, until thou shalt have come once more to the city of Athens.” Aegeus could make nothing of it, so he turned aside to Troezen to consult Pittheus, son of Pelops, a man famous for his wisdom. Pittheus understood the oracle at once and put it to work. Apollodorus says he made his guest drunk and laid him with his daughter Aethra; Plutarch says he persuaded Aegeus, or tricked him. The god had told him to wait. He did not wait.

Before he left, Aegeus hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock, in a hollow just large enough, Plutarch says, to take them. He told Aethra alone. If she bore a son, and if the boy grew strong enough to shift the stone and take what lay under it, she was to send him to Athens with the tokens and tell no one where he was going. Pausanias says Theseus rolled the rock away at sixteen, and that the Athenians later set up the scene on their Acropolis in bronze, all of it bronze except the rock.

Euripides tells the journey with a stop on the way. In his Medea, Aegeus walks into Corinth fresh from the oracle and finds Medea on her doorstep, abandoned by Jason and ordered into exile. He tells her the riddle; she tells him her ruin. Then she makes him an offer: shelter her in Athens and her drugs will end his childlessness. He agrees on one condition, that she reach his country by her own means, and he swears it by the Earth, by the light of the Sun and by all the gods. It is the oath she needs, and she turns straight to the plan that ends with her children dead. The classicist Dwora Gilula argued in the journal Scripta Classica Israelica that no surviving source before the Medea calls Aegeus childless at all, and that Euripides very probably invented both the childlessness and the wine-skin oracle to suit a play about a man robbed of his heirs; the hexameter version quoted by Apollodorus and Plutarch, on her reading, is a later reworking of the playwright’s lines.

Medea kept her side of the bargain in her own way. When Theseus reached Athens, Plutarch says, she was living with Aegeus, having promised to cure his childlessness with her sorceries, and she recognised the young stranger before the king did. Aegeus was old and afraid of the factions in the city, and she persuaded him the newcomer was a threat. In Apollodorus she first sends Theseus against the Marathonian bull, hoping it will do the work, and when he comes back with the bull beaten, she hands the king a cup of poison for his guest. The meat is served. The stranger draws his sword as if to carve with it, and the old man sees the hilt he left under a rock in Troezen and dashes the cup to the ground. Plutarch says the poison soaked into the ground where the enclosure of the Delphinium later stood, because that was where the house of Aegeus had been, and the Athenians still called the Hermes east of the sanctuary the Hermes at Aegeus’s gate. Medea was driven out. The sons of Pallas, seeing the throne slip away for good, went to war, and Theseus caught their ambush party at Gargettus and killed them all.

The debt to Crete was older. Minos’s son Androgeos had been killed in Attica, and Apollodorus says it was Aegeus who sent him against the Marathonian bull that killed him. Plutarch says Athens was struck by war, barren fields, plague and dried-up rivers until it agreed to send Minos seven youths and seven maidens every nine years. When the third tribute fell due, the people turned on their king: he had caused the whole affliction, they said, and he alone had no child in the lottery. Theseus volunteered. The tribute ship always sailed under a black sail. This time Aegeus gave the pilot a white one, to be hoisted if his son came home alive. The poet Simonides remembered it differently, as a scarlet sail dyed with the flower of the holm-oak.

The signal was never raised. Apollodorus blames Theseus’s grief for Ariadne, Plutarch the crew’s sheer joy at the sight of home. Aegeus was watching from the Acropolis, saw the black sail, and threw himself down. Pausanias was shown the place, beside the temple of Wingless Victory at the gateway, where the sea is visible from the rock. Hyginus has the king throw himself into the sea instead, and says the Aegean took its name from him. Plutarch adds the aftermath. The herald sent up from the harbour found the city split between mourning for its king and cheering for the news, accepted the victory garlands and hung them on his staff, and the Athenians kept the scene alive at the festival of the Oschophoria, where the staff and not the herald wore the crown and those at the libations cried out “Eleleu! Iou! Iou!”, a cry of triumph and a cry of dismay in one breath.

Death made Aegeus more important than life had. Pausanias saw a sanctuary in Athens called the hero-shrine of Aegeus, and a statue of him among the eponymous heroes near the Council House, the heroes whose names the Athenian tribes carried. He was not the only candidate for Theseus’s father, either. Bacchylides and Pindar make the hero a son of Poseidon, and R. C. Jebb, in his 1905 edition of Bacchylides, suggested that the key to the tangle was that Aegeus and Poseidon had once been the same figure. That remains a scholar’s hypothesis, not a myth anyone told.

He had no powers. What Aegeus had was a king’s authority, a host’s duty and an oath, and each of them worked against him. His word to Medea brought a poisoner into his house; his fear of his brothers made him hide his son; his fear of a stranger nearly made him kill that son; and his one clear instruction, a change of sail, was the one thing everybody forgot. Aegeus died from a colour seen at a distance, and the sea he looked at is still, in Hyginus’s telling, his.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Aegeus in Greek mythology?

Aegeus was a king of Athens and the father of the hero Theseus. He was the eldest son of Pandion and took the throne after Pandion’s sons drove the Metionidae out of Athens. He fathered Theseus on Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus of Troezen, after a visit to the Delphic oracle.

What oracle did Aegeus receive at Delphi?

Aegeus asked the oracle how he could have children and was told not to loose the neck of the wine-skin until he returned to Athens. He did not understand it and asked Pittheus of Troezen, who understood it and arranged for Aegeus to sleep with his daughter Aethra. The classicist Dwora Gilula argued that Euripides probably invented this oracle for his play Medea.

Why did Aegeus leave a sword and sandals under a rock?

Aegeus hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock at Troezen as tokens for the son Aethra might bear. If the boy could lift the rock, he was to take them to Athens so his father would know him. Theseus moved the rock at sixteen, and Aegeus later recognised him by the sword just before Theseus drank a cup of poison prepared by Medea.

How did Aegeus die?

Aegeus died by throwing himself down when he saw Theseus’s ship returning from Crete with a black sail, which he took as a sign that his son was dead. Theseus had promised to hoist a white sail if he survived but forgot. Apollodorus, Plutarch and Pausanias place the fall at the Acropolis of Athens, while Hyginus says Aegeus threw himself into the sea.

Is the Aegean Sea named after Aegeus?

The Latin mythographer Hyginus says the Aegean Sea was named after Aegeus because he threw himself into it when he saw the black sail. Other ancient writers, including Pausanias and Plutarch, place his fall on the Acropolis rock instead. Hyginus’s account is the one that links the sea’s name to the king.