The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (85 page)

d
. Thus they remained in torment for four full years, until Heracles, coming at Eurystheus’s command to fetch up Cerberus, recognized them as they mutely stretched out their hands, pleading for his help. Persephone received Heracles like a brother, graciously permitting him
to release the evil-doers and take them back to the upper air, if he could.
⁵
Heracles thereupon grasped Theseus by both hands and heaved with gigantic strength until, with a rending noise, he was torn free; but a great part of his flesh remained sticking to the rock, which is why Theseus’s Athenian descendants are all so absurdly small-buttocked. Next, he seized hold of Peirithous’s hands, but the earth quaked warningly, and he desisted; Peirithous had, after all, been the leading spirit in this blasphemous enterprise.
⁶

e
. According to some accounts, however, Heracles released Peirithous as well as Theseus; while, according to others, he released neither, but left Theseus chained for ever to a fiery chair, and Peirithous reclining beside Ixion on a golden couch – before their famished gaze rise magnificent banquets which the Eldest of the Furies constantly snatches away. It has even been said that Theseus and Peirithous never raided Tartarus at all, but only a Thesprotian or Molossian city named Cichyrus, whose king Aidoneus, finding that Peirithous intended to carry off his wife, threw him to a pack of hounds, and confined Theseus in a dungeon, from which Heracles eventually rescued him.
⁷

1
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 63; Pindar, quoted by Pausanias: i. 18. 5; Pausanias: i. 41. 5.

2
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Fabula
79; Plutarch:
Theseus
31.

3
. Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 24; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
143; Eustathius on Homer’s
Iliad
p. 215; Plutarch:
loc. cit.

4
. Hyginus:
Fabula
79; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit.
; Horace:
Odes
iv. 7. 27; Panyasis, quoted by Pausanias: x. 29. 4; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 24.

5
. Seneca:
Hippolytus
835 ff.; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 12; Diodorus Siculus iv.: 26; Euripides:
Madness of Heracles
619; Hyginus:
loc. cit.

6
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit.
; Suidas
sub
Lispoi; Scholiast on Aristophancs’s
Knights
1368.

7
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 63; Virgil:
Aeneid
vi. 601–19; Aclian:
Varia Historia
iv. 5; Plutarch:
Theseus
31.

1
. Leading heroes in several mythologies are said to have harrowed Hell: Theseus, Heracles (see 134.
c
), Dionysus (see 170.
m
), and Orpheus (see
28.
c
) in Greece; Bel and Marduk in Babylonia (see
71.
1
); Aeneas in Italy; Cuchulain in Ireland; Arthur, Gwydion, and Amathaon in Britain; Ogier le Danois in Brittany. The origin of the myth seems to be a temporary
death which the sacred king pretended to undergo at the close of his normal reign, while a boy
interrex
took his place for a single day, thus circumventing the law which forbade him to extend his term beyond the thirteen months of a solar year (see
7.
1
;
41.
1
; 123.
4
, etc.).

2
. Bel and his successor Marduk, spent their period of demise in battle with the marine monster Tiamat, an embodiment of the Sea-goddess Ishtar who sent the Deluge (see
73.
7
); like ancient Irish kings, who are reported to have gone out to do battle with the Atlantic breakers, they seem to have ceremonially drowned. An Etruscan vase shows the moribund king, whose name is given as Jason (see 148.
4
), in the jaws of a sea-monster: an icon from which the moral anecdote of Jonah and the Whale has apparently been deduced, Jonah being Marduk.

3
. Athenian mythographers have succeeded in disguising the bitter rivalry between Theseus and his acting-twin Peirithous (see
95.
2
) for the favours of the Goddess of Death-in-Life – who appears in the myth as both Helen (see
62.
3
) and Persephone – by presenting them as a devoted royal pair who, like Castor and Polydeuces, made an amatory raid on a neighbouring city (see
74.
c
), and one of whom was excused death because he could claim divine birth. Idas and Lynceus, a similar pair of twins, have been introduced into the story to emphasize this point. But Peirithous’s name, ‘he who turns about’, suggests that he was a sacred king in his own right, and on vase-paintings from Lower Italy he is shown ascending to the upper air and saying farewell to Theseus, who remains beside the Goddess of Justice, as though Theseus were merely his tanist.

4
. Helen’s abduction during a sacrifice recalls that of Oreithyia by Boreas (see
48.
a
), and may have been deduced from the same icon showing erotic orgies at the Athenian Thesmophoria. It is possible, of course, that a shrine of the Attic goddess Helen at Aphidnae contained an image or other cult object stolen by the Athenians from her Laconian counterpart – if the visit to Tartarus is a doublet of the story, they may have made a sea-raid on Taenarus – and that this was subsequently recovered by the Spartans.

5
. The four years of Theseus’s stay in Tartarus are the usual period during which a sacred king made room for his tanist; a new sacred king, Theseus
redivivus
, would then be installed. An attempt was made by the Athenians to raise their national hero to the status of an Olympian god, like Dionysus and Heracles, by asserting that he had escaped from death; but their Peloponnesian enemies successfully opposed this claim. Some insisted that he had never escaped, but was punished eternally for his insolence, like Ixion and Sisyphus. Others rationalized the story by saying that he raided Cichyrus, not Tartarus; and took the trouble to explain that Peirithous had not been mauled by Cerberus, but by Molossian
hounds, the largest and fiercest breed in Greece. The most generous concession made to Athenian myth was that Theseus, released on bail after a humiliating session in the Chair of Forgetfulness (see
37.
2
), had apologetically transferred most of his temples and sanctuaries to Heracles the Rescuer, whose labours and sufferings he aped.

6
. Yet Theseus was a hero of some importance, and must be given the credit of having harrowed Hell, in the sense that he penetrated to the centre of the Cretan maze, where Death was waiting, and came safely out again. Had the Athenians been as strong on land as they were at sea, he would doubtless have become an Olympian or, at least, a national demi-god. The central source of this hostility towards Theseus is probably Delphi, where Apollo’s Oracles was notoriously subservient to the Spartans in their struggle against Athens.

104

THE DEATH OF THESEUS

D
URING
Theseus’s absence in Tartarus the Dioscuri assembled an army of Laconians and Arcadians, marched against Athens, and demanded the return of Helen. When the Athenians denied that they were sheltering her, or had the least notion where she might be, the Dioscuri proceeded to ravage Attica, until the inhabitants of Deceleia, who disapproved of Theseus’s conduct, guided them to Aphidnae, where they found and rescued their sister. The Dioscuri then razed Aphidnae to the ground; but the Deceleians are still immune from all Spartan taxes and entitled to seats of honour at Spartan festivals – their lands alone were spared in the Peloponnesian War, when the invading Spartans laid Attica waste.
¹

b
. Others say that the revealer of Helen’s hiding-place was one Academus, or Echedemus, an Arcadian, who had come to Attica on Theseus’s invitation. The Spartans certainly treated him with great honour while he was alive and, in their later invasions, spared his small estate on the river Cephissus, six stadia distant from Athens. This is now called the Academia: a beautiful, well-watered garden, where philosophers meet and express their irreligious views on the nature of the gods.
²

c
. Marathus led the Arcadian contingent of the Dioscuri’s army and, in obedience to an oracle, offered himself for sacrifice at the head of
his men. Some say that it was he, not Marathon the father of Sicyon and Corinthus, who gave his name to the city of Marathon.
³

d
. Now, Peteos son of Orneus and grandson of Erechtheus had been banished by Aegeus, and the Dioscuri, to spite Theseus, brought back his son Menestheus from exile, and made him regent of Athens. This Menestheus was the first demagogue. During Theseus’s absence in Tartarus he ingratiated himself with the people by reminding the nobles of the power which they had forfeited through Federalization, and by telling the poor that they were being robbed of country and religion, and had become subject to an adventurer of obscure origin – who, however, had now vacated the throne and was rumoured dead.
⁴

e
. When Aphidnae fell, and Athens was in danger, Menestheus persuaded the people to welcome the Dioscuri into the city as their benefactors and deliverers. They did indeed behave most correctly, and asked only to be admitted to the Eleusinian Mysteries, as Heracles had been. This request was granted, and the Dioscuri became honorary citizens of Athens. Aphidnus was their adoptive father, as Pylius had been Heracles’s on a similar occasion. Divine honours were thereafter paid them at the rising of their constellation, in gratitude for the clemency which they had shown to the common people; and they cheerfully brought Helen back to Sparta, with Theseus’s mother Aethra and a sister of Peirithous as her bond-woman. Some say that they found Helen still a virgin; others, that Theseus had got her with child and that at Argos, on the way home, she gave birth to a girl, Iphigeneia, and dedicated a sanctuary to Artemis in gratitude for her safe delivery.
⁵

f
. Theseus, who returned from Tartarus soon afterwards, at once raised an altar to Heracles the Saviour, and reconsecrated to him all but four of his own temples and groves. However, he had been greatly weakened by his tortures, and found Athens so sadly corrupted by faction and sedition that he was no longer able to maintain order.
⁶
First smuggling his children out of the city to Euboea, where Elpenor son of Chalcodon sheltered them – but some say that they had fled there before his return – and then solemnly cursing the people of Athens from Mount Gargcttus, he sailed for Crete, where Deucalion had promised to shelter him.

g
. A storm blew the ship off her course, and his first landfall was the island of Scyros, near Euboea, where King Lycomedes, though a close friend of Menestheus, received him with all the splendour due to his
fame and lineage. Theseus, who had inherited an estate on Scyros, asked permission to settle there. But Lycomedes had long regarded this estate as his own and, under the pretence of showing Theseus its boundaries, inveigled him to the top of a high cliff, pushed him over, and then gave out that he had fallen accidentally while taking a drunken, post-prandial stroll.
⁷