The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (86 page)

h
. Menestheus, now left in undisturbed possession of the throne, was among Helen’s suitors, and led the Athenian forces to Troy, where he won great fame as a strategist but was killed in battle. The sons of Theseus succeeded him.
⁸

i
. Theseus is said to have forcibly abducted Anaxo of Troezen; and to have lain with Iope, daughter of Tirynthian Iphicles. His love-affairs caused the Athenians such frequent embarrassment that they were slow to appreciate his true worth even for several generations after he had died. At the Battle of Marathon, however, his spirit rose from the earth to hearten them, bearing down fully armed upon the Persians; and when victory had been secured, the Delphic Oracle gave orders that his bones should be brought home. The people of Athens had suffered from the Scyrians’ contumely for many years, and the Oracle announced that this would continue so long as they retained the bones.
⁹
But to recover them was a difficult task, because the Scyrians were no less surly than fierce and, when Cimon captured the island, would not reveal the whereabouts of Theseus’s grave. However, Cimon observed a she-eagle on a hill-top, tearing up the soil with her talons. Acclaiming this as a sign from Heaven, he seized a mattock, hastened to the hole made by the eagle, and began to enlarge it. Almost at once the mattock struck a stone coffin, inside which he found a tall skeleton, armed with a bronze lance and a sword; it could only be that of Theseus. The skeleton was reverently brought to Athens, and re-interred amid great ceremony in Theseus’s sanctuary near the Gymnasium.
¹⁰

j
. Theseus was a skilled lyre-player and has now become joint-patron with Heracles and Hermes of every gymnasium and wrestling school in Greece. His resemblance to Heracles is proverbial. He took part in the Calydonian Hunt; avenged the champions who fell at Thebes; and only failed to be one of the Argonauts through being detained in Tartarus when they sailed for Colchis. The first war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians was caused by his abduction of Helen, and the second by his refusal to surrender Heracles’s sons to King Eurystheus.
¹¹

k
. Ill-treated slaves and labourers, whose ancestors looked to him for protection against their oppressors, now seek refuge in his sanctuary, where sacrifices are offered to him on the eighth day of every month. This day may have been chosen because he first arrived at Athens from Troezen on the eighth of Hecatomboeon, and returned from Crete on the eighth day of Pyanepsion. Or perhaps because he was a son of Poseidon: for Poseidon’s feasts are also observed on that day of the month, since eight, being the first cube of an even number, represents Poseidon’s unshakeable power.
¹²

1
. Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 23; Hereas, quoted by Plutarch:
Theseus
32; Herodotus: ix. 73.

2
. Dicaearchus, quoted by Plutarch:
loc. cit
.; Diogenes Laertius: iii. 1. 9; Plutarch:
Cimon
13.

3
. Dicaearchus, quoted by Plutarch:
Theseus
32; Pausanias: ii. 1. 1.

4
. Pausanias: x. 35. 5; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 23; Plutarch:
loc. cit
.

5
. Plutarch:
Theseus
33; Hyginus:
Fabula
79; Pausanias: ii. 22. 7.

6
. Aelian:
Varia Historia
iv. 5; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch:
Theseus
35; Plutarch:
loc
.
cit.

7
. Pausanias: i. 17. 6; Plutarch:
loc. cit
.

8
. Plutarch:
loc. cit.
; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 8.

9
. Plutarch:
Theseus
29 and 36; Pausanias: i. 15. 4; and iii. 3. 6.

10
. Pausanias: i. 17. 6; Plutarch:
loc. cit
.

11
. Pausanias: v. 19. 1; iv. 32. 1 and i. 32. 5; Plutarch:
Theseus
29 and 36; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 101.

12
. Plutarch:
Theseus
36.

1
. Menestheus the Erechtheid, who is praised in
Iliad
ii. 552 ff. for his outstanding military skill, and reigned at Athens during Theseus’s four years’ absence in Tartarus, seems to have been his mortal twin and co-king, the Athenian counterpart of Peirithous the Lapith. Here he appears as a prototype of the Athenian demagogues who, throughout the Peloponnesian War, favoured peace with Sparta at any price; but the mythographer, while deploring his tactics, is careful not to offend the Dioscuri, to whom Athenian sailors prayed for succour when overtaken by storms.

2
. The theme of the feathered
pharmacos
reappears in the names of Menestheus’s father and grandfather, and in the death of Theseus himself. This took place on the island of Scyros (‘stony’), also spelled
Sciros
; which suggests that, in the icon from which the story has been deduced, the word
scir
(an abbreviated form of Scirophoria, explaining why the king is being flung from a cliff) has been mistaken for the name of the island. If so, Lycomedes will have been the victim; his was a common
Athenian name. Originally, it seems, sacrifices were offered to the Moon-goddess on the eighth day of each lunation, when she entered her second phase, this being the right time of the month for planting; but when Poseidon married her, and appropriated her cult, the month became a solar period, no longer linked with the moon.

3
. The mythic importance of Marathus (‘fennel’) lay in the use made of fennel stalks for carrying the new sacred fire from a central hearth to private ones (see
39.
g
), after their annual extinction (see 149.
3
).

4
. Before closing the story of Theseus, let me here add a further note to the Tragliatella vase (see
98.
3
), which shows the sacred king and his tanist escaping from a maze. I have now seen the picture on the other side of this vase, which is of extraordinary interest as the prologue to this escape: a sunwise procession on foot led by the unarmed sacred king. Seven men escort him, each armed with three javelins and a shield with a boar device, the spear-armed tanist bringing up the rear. These seven men evidently represent the seven months ruled by the tanist, which fall between the apple harvest and Easter – the boar being his household badge (see
18.
7
). The scene takes place on the day of the king’s ritual death, and the Moon-queen (Pasiphaë – see
88.
7
) has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm threateningly akimbo. With the outstretched other arm she is offering him an apple, which is his passport to Paradise; and the three spears that each man carries spell death. Yet the king is being guided by a small female figure robed like the other – we may call her the princess Ariadne (see
98.
k
), who helped Theseus to escape from the death-maze at Cnossos. And he is boldly displaying, as a counter-charm to the apple, an Easter-egg, the egg of resurrection. Easter was the season when the Troy-town dances were performed in the turf-cut mazes of Britain, and Etruria too. An Etruscan sacred egg of polished black trachite, found at Perugia, with an arrow in relief running around it, is this same holy egg.