Athenian public opinion was highly critical of Theseus. Here was the heir to the throne, a bastard and a foreigner, coming off scot-free, while ordinary people’s legitimate children were being sent to a dreadful fate. Theseus took the point and volunteered to be a member of the tribute group and destroy the Minotaur.
Being of a tricky frame of mind, he swapped two of the girls for a couple of pretty (but manly) boys; he softened their skins by warm baths, kept them out of the sun, got them to use makeup, gave them frocks, and trained them to walk in a feminine manner (we shall see later that this was not the only time a Greek used drag as a deadly ruse).
On previous occasions the ship carrying the captives had shown a black sail, as a sign of mourning. But Theseus promised that he would give the captain another sail, a white one, for him to hoist on the return voyage as a sign that he had killed the Minotaur.
Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and showed him how to master the intricacies of the labyrinth. She gave him a ball of string, which he unwound as he walked along, thus enabling him to find his way back. As he had vowed, he put the Minotaur to death and cut off its head.
Theseus and the other boys and girls escaped from Crete. The now pregnant Ariadne and her sister came along with them, but they were dumped on the island of Naxos. Ariadne hanged herself in despair (or, according to another account, married on the rebound the wine god Dionysus, who was passing by).
As they approached Attica, Theseus and the ship’s captain forgot to change the sails. When Aegeus saw the boat come into harbor sporting its black flag, he committed suicide by flinging himself off the Acropolis.
As we have seen, Theseus had a cheating, sometimes violent way with women. He and his best friend, a Thessalian called Pirithous, kidnapped Helen, later to be “of Troy.” He was fifty years old and she a prepubescent girl; he said he meant to keep her until she was old enough to marry and have sex with. But she was rescued and the plan failed.
Theseus joined in a war with the Amazons, a race of aggressive women who forswore men. Their queen, Hippolyta, was tricked into boarding Theseus’s ship; he took her back to Athens where he married her. However, he soon put her away in favor of Ariadne’s little sister, Phaedra.
Pirithous had the not-so-clever idea of going down into the underworld and kidnapping the Queen of the Dead, Persephone. He took Theseus along with him and the pair wandered around the outskirts of Tartarus, a deep abyss where the wicked are endlessly tortured. They were caught and led away to eternal punishment by the Furies, ancient goddesses of vengeance, who had snakes in their hair and whips in their hands. Both men were placed on the Chair of Amnesia; they grew into it and were held fast by coiled serpents. Here they were to live or partly live forever.
By a stroke of luck Heracles happened to be visiting. He was engaged on the last of his Labors, the capture of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. He persuaded Persephone to let bygones be bygones and Theseus was restored to the upper air. His comrade remained unforgiven and, for all we know, is still suffering.
On his return to Athens, the family atmosphere in the palace on the Acropolis became strained when Phaedra fell incestuously in love with Hippolytus, Theseus’s son by Hippolyta. He rejected her advances. False evidence from Phaedra led the angry king to cause his son’s death at the hands of the sea god Poseidon. She then killed herself out of guilt.
—
The Athenians were sure that Theseus was a historical figure. A thirty-oared galley, said to be the ship on which he had sailed to and from Crete, was preserved and was still on public display in the fourth century. Its old timbers were replaced with new wood as they rotted away. This gave philosophers a handy conundrum for their pupils. When all the timbers had been exchanged, was the ship the same ship or a different one?
In fact, of course, Theseus was fictional and probably originated as a local divinity in northern Attica. However, there was one aspect of his achievement that did actually take place, even if the date is unknown and the personal credit must go to some other leader (or leaders) whose names have been lost. It was the first step that Athens took towards greatness.
Athens with its near-impregnable citadel was the largest of numerous independent small towns and villages in Attica. Plutarch reports that Theseus
conceived a wonderful and far-reaching plan, which was nothing less than to concentrate the inhabitants of Attica into a single urban area. In this way he transformed them into one community belonging to one city; until then they had been scattered about, so that it was difficult to bring them together in the common interest.
He campaigned vigorously village by village and won the support of the poor. To the more influential classes, he proposed that a limited form of democracy should be established. All citizens were to be on an equal footing, although the government and the conduct of religious rites would be placed (or remain) in the hands of the landed aristocracy. Many went to live in Athens, leaving it every day to work in the fields.
This process was called synoecism, or a “bringing together into one home.” Attica was now a unitary polity with central control exercised by Athens. In other words, it became a city-state, or (to use the Greek word) a polis. Its national hero, Theseus, stood as the symbol of this groundbreaking development.
Similar reforms unfolded elsewhere in Greece, not always with complete success. In Boeotia, for instance, the lands lying to the north of Attica, the largest city, Thebes, never managed to secure more than a fractious federation. Throughout its history it was always having to use force to maintain its authority over its constituent parts.
Theseus was regarded as the first people’s ruler of Athens. He laid aside his royal power, reserving to himself only the supreme command in war and guardianship of the law. In practice, of course, this meant that he was still in charge, a benevolent autocrat. Plutarch’s overall verdict is that he “founded a commonwealth, so to speak, of all sorts and conditions of citizen. However, he did not let his democracy become confused and disordered by multitudes of immigrants.”
—
These stories about Theseus reflect the attitudes of those who made them up—namely, Athenians in search of a founding myth. Banditry and violence were common in the classical world and here we have a hero ready and able to put down criminal behavior wherever he found it. What is more, his deeds are clearly constructed on the model of the celebrated Labors of Heracles, seemingly impossible tasks that the strongman completed with ease. Athens wanted its own personalized Heracles-alternative.
A believer in the rule of law, this fictional Theseus was only too happy to break it when it suited him. Careless, sexist, and a little sociopathic, intelligent and attractive, willing to thumb his nose at the gods and capable of taking punishment for his impertinence, Theseus was the kind of man Athenians liked to be like. We will meet his type time and again as we proceed through the city’s history.
The “Dark Age” that followed the mysterious collapse of the Mycenean civilization lasted for about three centuries. Monarchs like Theseus became a rarity and some time before 800, when the Greeks emerged into the light, Athens became a republic governed by a group of noble families, an aristocracy. Combative and unruly, they were a collective of Theseuses.