Theseus

Also Known As: Greek Θησεύς, Thēseus; the name was linked in antiquity to thesis, “a setting down” or “a deposit,” after the tokens his father buried for him
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Exceptional strength and wrestling skill, a habit of destroying killers by their own methods, and a claim to two fathers, one mortal and one divine.
Role in Mythos: Athens’ national hero, credited with clearing the coast road of bandits, killing the Minotaur, and gathering the scattered communities of Attica into a single city.
Relation to Humans: He was the hero Athenians claimed as an ancestor and a founder, honoured with a shrine in the heart of the city and a festival in his name. He was also, in the same stories, a man whose appetites and forgetfulness destroyed most of the people who got close to him.

The road from Troezen to Athens was not a road anyone sensible walked. It ran along the Saronic coast through pine scrub and past cliff edges where the wind came up off the water carrying salt and resin, and every profitable stretch of it belonged to somebody who killed for a living. There was a ship. The ship was safe, and it was quick, and a boy setting out from his grandfather’s house was begged to take it. He went on foot instead, with a sword he had pulled out of the dirt that morning and a pair of sandals that had been buried in the same hole, and by the time he reached the city gates his reputation had arrived ahead of him.

He came from Troezen because his mother was there. Aethra was the daughter of Pittheus, and Aegeus, childless king of a smaller and shakier Athens than the one his son would leave behind, had come through on his way home from Delphi with an oracle he could not understand. Pittheus understood it perfectly and got him drunk. In the accounts that make Theseus fully mortal, that is the whole of it. In the accounts Athenians preferred, Aethra waded across to the little island of Sphairia that same night at Athena’s prompting and lay with Poseidon there, so that the boy had two fathers and the sea itself was in him. The stories never resolve this and never seem to feel they need to. Before he left, Aegeus wedged a sword and a pair of sandals beneath a boulder and told Aethra that if the child could ever shift the rock, he could come and find him.

What Theseus did on that road became the pattern for everything he did afterwards. He did not simply kill the men who preyed on travellers. He killed each of them with their own apparatus, which is a very particular kind of statement. Periphetes was beaten down with the bronze club he used on everyone else. Sinis, who bent pines to the ground and used their spring to tear people apart, went the same way. Sciron made travellers kneel to wash his feet and then kicked them off the rocks into the sea, so Theseus put him off the rocks. Cercyon, king of Eleusis, wrestled all comers to the death and lost, and Plutarch credits Theseus with turning wrestling from brute mass into an actual science that day. Then came Procrustes, who offered a bed to anyone passing and adjusted his guests to fit it, stretching the short and cutting down the tall. He was measured against his own bed and found unsatisfactory.

Athens nearly killed him where the bandits had not. Medea was living with Aegeus by then, knew exactly who this celebrated young stranger was, and persuaded the old king that he was a threat. The cup of poison was already at Theseus’ lips when Aegeus saw the sword at his hip and recognised the hilt he had buried under a rock a lifetime earlier, and knocked the cup out of his hand.

Then Crete. Athens was paying Minos a tribute of young men and women, sent to be shut in the Labyrinth with the Minotaur, and Theseus put himself on the ship. On the crossing Minos provoked him, throwing a golden ring into the water and inviting the boy who claimed Poseidon for a father to go and fetch it. Theseus went over the side. The sea closed cold and green above him, and down in the halls below he found Amphitrite, who wrapped a purple cloak around his shoulders and set a wreath dark with roses on his wet hair. He surfaced wearing both, and the crew on deck understood that the question of who owned the Aegean had just been quietly settled.

In Knossos, Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him a ball of thread and the trick of tying one end at the door. He went into the dark, found the thing at the centre of it, and killed it with his bare hands in most tellings. What happened next is the part Athenians told with less enthusiasm. Ariadne sailed with him and did not arrive. She was left on Naxos, abandoned or forgotten or, in the version that lets everyone save face, claimed there by Dionysus. And Theseus, who had promised his father he would raise a white sail if he lived, came into sight of Attica under the black one. Aegeus threw himself off the height and into the water that has carried his name ever since.

There is no reliable account of what he looked like. The sources are far more specific about his hair than his face, noting that when he went to Delphi as a young man he shaved only the front of his head, the way the Abantes cropped theirs so that no enemy could get a fist in it. Athenian vase painters filled the gap with what they wanted him to be, a beardless athlete with the long clean muscle of a youth still in training, usually mid-stride, usually with a sword.

As king he did the least mythic and most consequential thing in his story. He dissolved the separate councils of the scattered Attic communities and gathered them into one city, the synoikismos, and Athenians remembered him afterwards as the man who had handed power to the people. It is worth being plain about this. The Theseus who unifies Attica, founds festivals and behaves like a constitutional first citizen is substantially a construction of sixth and fifth century Athens, assembled by a city that needed a founder to set against Dorian Heracles. In 476 BC the statesman Kimon sailed to Skyros, came back with a set of oversized bones, and installed them in a shrine in the city. The Athenians also kept his ship in the harbour for centuries, replacing planks as they rotted, until their philosophers were arguing about whether it was still the same ship. He remains the only Greek hero to have generated a metaphysics problem.

His strength was real and his cleverness was better, and both were sharpened by an instinct for taking an enemy’s own advantage and turning it around. The sea answered him. He could wrestle anyone. What he could not do was leave things alone. He carried off the Amazon Antiope and brought a war down on Athens. He married Phaedra, whose passion for his son Hippolytus ended with Theseus calling down Poseidon’s curse on the boy and getting it. He was a terrible husband. He went down to the underworld with his friend Pirithous to take Persephone, and the two of them sat down on a stone seat and could not get up again, and Theseus only came out because Heracles happened to be passing. He stole the girl Helen out of Sparta, and her brothers came for her and took Attica apart. By the end Athens had had enough of him. He went to Skyros looking for shelter, and Lycomedes walked him up onto the cliffs one evening and pushed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Theseus in Greek mythology?

Theseus was the national hero and legendary king of Athens, credited with killing the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth and with uniting the scattered communities of Attica into a single city. He was raised in Troezen by his mother Aethra and travelled to Athens on foot as a young man, clearing the coast road of bandits along the way. Athenians claimed him as a founder and honoured him with a shrine and a festival.

Who were Theseus’ parents?

His mother was Aethra, daughter of Pittheus of Troezen. His father is Aegeus, king of Athens, in some accounts and the sea god Poseidon in others, and several tellings have Aethra lie with both on the same night so that Theseus has a mortal and a divine father at once. The ancient sources never settle the question.

How did Theseus kill the Minotaur?

Theseus volunteered to join the group of young Athenians sent as tribute to Crete, and Minos’ daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread so he could find his way back out of the Labyrinth. He tied one end at the entrance, went into the maze, and killed the Minotaur, in most versions with his bare hands. He then led the other Athenians out and sailed for home.

Why is the Aegean Sea named after Aegeus?

Theseus had promised his father Aegeus that he would hoist a white sail on the return voyage if he survived Crete, but the ship came back flying the black sail it had left under. Seeing it, Aegeus threw himself into the water and drowned, and the sea took his name.

How did Theseus die?

Theseus lost his hold on Athens late in life and went to the island of Skyros seeking refuge, where its king Lycomedes pushed him from a cliff into the sea. Some accounts say more charitably that he slipped while walking after dinner. In 476 BC the Athenian statesman Kimon brought bones back from Skyros as the hero’s remains and enshrined them in Athens.