The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (76 page)

6
. Pausanias: ii. 32. 8; Plutarch:
Theseus
4 and 6; Lactantius on Statius’s
Thebaid
xii. 194.

7
. Pausanias: i. 27. 8.

8
. Homer:
Iliad
ii. 542; Pausanias:
loc. cit
. and ü. 32. 7; Plutarch:
Theseus
5 and 7.

1
. Pittheus is a masculine form of Pitthea. The names of the towns which he united to form Troezen suggests a matriarchal calendar-triad (see
75.
2
), consisting of Anthea (‘flowery’), the Goddess of Spring; Hyperea (‘being overhead’), the Goddess of Summer, when the sun is at its zenith; and Pitthea (‘pine-goddess’), worshipped in autumn when Attis-Adonis (see
79.
1
) was sacrificed on his pine. They may be identified with the Triple-goddess Themis, to whom Pittheus raised an altar since the name Troezen is apparently a worn-down form of
trion hezomenon
, ‘[the city] of the three sitters’, which refers to the three white thrones which served ‘Pittheus and two others’ as seats of justice.

2
. Theseus must originally have had a twin, since his mother lay with both a god and a mortal on the same night; the myths of Idas and Lynceus Castor and Polydeuces (see
74.
1
), Heracles and Iphicles (see 118.
3
), make this certain. Moreover, he wore the lion-skin, like Heracles, and will therefore have been the sacred king, not the tanist. But when, after the Persian Wars, Theseus became the chief national hero of Athens, his paternity at least had to be Athenian, because his mother came from Troezen. The mythographers then decided to have it both ways: he was an Athenian, the son of Aegeus, a mortal; but whenever he needed to claim Poseidon as his father, he could do so (see
98.
j
and
101.
f
). In either case, his mother remained a Troezenian; Athens had important interests there. He was also allowed a honorary twin, Peirithous who, being mortal, could not escape from Tartarus – as Heracles, Polydeuces, and Theseus himself did (see
74.
j
;
103.
d
; and 134.
d
). No efforts were spared to connect Theseus with Heracles, but the Athenians never grew powerful enough to make him into an Olympian god.

3
. There seem, however, to have been at least three mythological characters called Theseus: one from Troezen, one from Marathon in Attica, and the third from Lapith territory. These were not unified into a single character until the sixth century
B
.
C
., when (as Professor George Thomson suggests) the Butads, a Lapith clan who had become leading aristocrats at Athens and even usurped the native Pelasgian priesthood of Erechtheus, put forward the Athenian Theseus as a rival to Dorian Heracles (see
47.
4
). Again, Pittheus was clearly both an Elean and a Troezenian title – also borne by the eponymous hero of an Attic deme belonging to the Cecropian tribe.

4
. Aethra’s visit to Sphaeria suggests that the ancient custom of self-prostitution
by unmarried girls survived in Athene’s temple for some time after the patriarchal system had been introduced. It can hardly have been brought from Crete, since Troezen is not a Mycenaean site; but was perhaps a Canaanite importation, as at Corinth.

5
. Sandals and sword are ancient symbols of royalty; the drawing of a sword from a rock seems to have formed part of the Bronze Age coronation ritual (see
81.
2
). Odin, Galahad, and Arthur were all in turn required to perform a similar feat; and an immense sword, lion-hilted and plunged into a rock, figures in the sacred marriage scene carved at Hattasus (see 145.
5
). Since Aegeus’s rock is called both the Altar of Strong Zeus and the Rock of Theseus, it may be assumed that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Theseus’ were alternative titles of the sacred king, who was crowned upon it; but the goddess armed him. The ‘Apollo’ to whom Theseus dedicated his hair will have been Karu (‘son of the goddess Car’ – see
82.
6
and
86.
2
), otherwise known as Car, or Q’re, or Carys, the solar king whose locks were annually shorn before his death (see
83.
3
), like those of Tyrian Samson and Megarean Nisus (see
91.
1
). At a feast called the Comyria (‘hair trimming’), young men sacrificed their forelocks in yearly mourning for him, and were afterwards known as Curetes (see
7.
4
). This custom, probably of Libyan origin (Herodotus: iv. 194), had spread to Asia Minor and Greece; an injunction against it occurs in
Leviticus
xxi. 5. But, by Plutarch’s time, Apollo was worshipped as the immortal Sun-god and, in proof of this, kept his own hair rigorously unshorn.

6
. Aetius’s division of Troezenia between Troezen, Pittheus, and himself, recalls the arrangement made by Proetus with Melampus and Bias (see
72.
h
). The Pittheus who taught rhetoric and whose treatise survived until Classical times must have been a late historical character.

96

THE LABOURS OF THESEUS

T
HESEUS
set out to free the bandit-ridden coast road which led from Troezen to Athens. He would pick no quarrels but take vengeance on all who dared molest him, making the punishment fit the crime, as was Heracles’s way.
¹
At Epidaurus, Periphetes the cripple waylaid him. Periphetes, whom some call Poseidon’s son, and others the son of Hephaestus and Anticleia, owned a huge brazen club, with which he used to kill wayfarers; hence his nickname Corunetes, or ‘cudgel-man’.
Theseus wrenched the club from his hands and battered him to death. Delighted with its size and weight, he proudly carried it about ever afterwards; and though he himself had been able to parry its murderous swing, in his hands it never failed to kill.
²

b
. At the narrowest point of the Isthmus, where both the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs are visible, lived Sinis, the son of Pemon; or, some say, of Polypemon and Sylea, daughter of Corinthus, who claimed to be Poseidon’s bastard.
³
He had been nicknamed Pityocamptes, or ‘pine-bender’, because he was strong enough to bend down the tops of pine-trees until they touched the earth, and would often ask innocent passers-by to help him with this task, but then suddenly release his hold. As the tree sprang upright again, they were hurled high into the air, and killed by the fall. Or he would bend down the tops of two neighbouring trees until they met, and tie one of his victim’s arms to each, so that he was torn asunder when the trees were released.
⁴

c
. Theseus wrestled with Sinis, overpowered him, and served him as he had served others. At this, a beautiful girl ran to hide herself in a thicket of rushes and wild asparagus. He followed her and, after a long search, found her invoking the plants, promising never to burn or destroy them if they hid her safely. When Theseus swore not to do her any violence, she consented to emerge, and proved to be Sinis’s daughter Perigune. Perigune fell in love with Theseus at sight, forgiving the murder of her hateful father and, in due course, bore him a son, Melanippus. Afterwards he gave her in marriage to Deioneus the Oechalian. Melanippus’s son Ioxus emigrated to Caria, where he became the ancestor of the Ioxids, who burn neither rushes nor wild asparagus, but venerate both.
⁵

d
. Some, however, say that Theseus killed Sinis many years later, and rededicated the Isthmian Games to him, although they had been founded by Sisyphus in honour of Melicertes, the son of Ino.
⁶

e
. Next, at Crommyum, he hunted and destroyed a fierce and monstrous wild sow, which had killed so many Crommyonians that they no longer dared plough their fields. This beast, named after the crone who bred it, was said to be the child of Typhon and Echidne.
⁷

f
. Following the coast road, Theseus came to the precipitous cliffs rising sheer from the sea, which had become a stronghold of the bandit Sciron; some call him a Corinthian, the son of Pelops, or of Poseidon; others, the son of Henioche and Canethus.
⁸
Sciron used to seat himself upon a rock and force passing travellers to wash his feet: when they
stooped to the task he would kick them over the cliff into the sea, where a giant turtle swam about, waiting to devour them. (Turtles closely resemble tortoises, except that they are larger, and have flippers instead of feet.) Theseus, refusing to wash Sciron’s feet, lifted him from the rock and flung him into the sea.
⁹

g
. The Megareans, however, say that the only Sciron with whom Theseus came in conflict was an honest and generous prince of Megara, the father of Endeis, who married Aeacus and bore him Peleus and Telamon; they add, that Theseus killed Sciron after the capture of Eleusis, many years later, and celebrated the Isthmian Games in his honour under the patronage of Poseidon.
¹⁰

h
. The cliffs of Sciron rise close to the Molurian Rocks, and over them runs Sciron’s footpath, made by him when he commanded the armies of Megara. A violent north-westerly breeze which blows seaward across these heights is called Sciron by the Athenians.
¹¹

i
. Now,
sciron
means ‘parasol’; and the month of Scirophorion is so called because at the Women’s Festival of Demeter and Core, on the twelfth day of Scirophorion, the priest of Erechtheus carries a white parasol, and a priestess of Athene Sciras carries another in solemn procession from the Acropolis – for on that occasion the goddess’s image is daubed with
sciras
, a sort of gypsum, to commemorate the white image which Theseus made of her after he had destroyed the Minotaur.
¹²

j
. Continuing his journey to Athens, Theseus met Cercyon the Arcadian, whom some call the son of Branchus and the nymph Argiope; others, the son of Hephaestus, or Poseidon.
¹³
He would challenge passers-by to wrestle with him and then crush them to death in his powerful embrace; but Theseus lifted him up by the knees and, to the delight of Demeter, who witnessed the struggle, dashed him headlong to the ground. Cercyon’s death was instantaneous. Theseus did not trust to strength so much as to skill, for he had invented the art of wrestling, the principles of which were not hitherto understood. The Wrestling-ground of Cercyon is still shown near Eleusis, on the road to Megara, close to the grave of his daughter Alope, whom Theseus is said to have ravished.
¹⁴

k
. On reaching Attic Corydallus, Theseus slew Sinis’s father Polypemon, surnamed Procrustes, who lived beside the road and had two beds in his house, one small the other large. Offering a night’s lodging to travellers, he would lay the short men on the large bed, and rack
them out to fit it; but the tall men on the small bed, sawing off as much of their legs as projected beyond it. Some say, however, that he used only one bed, and lengthened or shortened his lodgers according to its measure. In either case, Theseus served him as he had served others.
¹⁵