Athens had a problem. It was the most famous city in Greece, proud of its democracy and its goddess, but it did not have a great founding hero. Thebes had Cadmus. Argos had Perseus. The whole Peloponnese had Heracles. Athens, for a long time, had a king who was half snake, a few kings with unclear names, and a lot of local stories. At some point in the sixth century BCE, the city seems to have decided to fix this, and the result was Theseus. He is the most deliberately constructed hero in Greek myth, and the interesting thing about him is not what he does. It is what the stories keep making him forget.
The boy with the sword
The beginning is familiar. Theseus is the son of Aegeus, king of Athens, and Aethra, a princess of Troezen, though in some tellings his real father is Poseidon. Aegeus, before going home, hides a sword and a pair of sandals under a heavy rock, and tells Aethra that if the boy can lift it when he is grown, he should bring the tokens to Athens. Theseus lifts it easily at sixteen.
He could go by sea, which is safe. Instead he chooses the road, the long way round the Isthmus, which is full of bandits. And that is where the first great set of stories happens. He meets Periphetes, who kills travellers with a club, and kills him with his own club. He meets Sinis, who ties people to bent pine trees and lets them spring apart, and Theseus does that to him. Sciron kicks travellers off a cliff to be eaten by a giant turtle, and Theseus throws him over. Cercyon challenges everyone to wrestling and kills the loser, and Theseus beats and kills him. Procrustes invites guests to sleep in an iron bed and stretches or cuts them to fit, and Theseus does it to him.
Do you see the pattern? Every villain is killed by his own method. I think the Athenians loved this because it is an image of justice, and a very early one: whatever you did to others is what happens to you. It is the closest thing the myth has to a legal principle, delivered in short, brutal scenes.
The tribute and the thread
When he arrives in Athens, he has to survive an attempt by Aegeus's wife, the sorceress Medea, to poison him. At the last second his father recognises the sword and knocks the cup from his hand. Then Theseus learns about the tribute. Years earlier, King Minos of Crete had lost a son in Athens, and as revenge forced the city to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete at regular intervals, to be fed to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.
Theseus volunteers to go as one of the victims. In Crete, Minos's daughter Ariadne falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread, so that he can find his way back out of the maze. He kills the Minotaur, follows the thread, and escapes with the other Athenians, taking Ariadne with him.
It is the best-known story in his cycle, and the way it ends is, to me, the clearest sign of what the whole myth is doing.
The first forgetting
On the way home, they stop at the island of Naxos, and Ariadne is left behind. The ancient sources do not agree on why. In one version he abandons her in her sleep, deliberately. In another, the god Dionysus appears and tells him to leave her, because the god wants her for himself. In the Odyssey, there is a brief, strange line saying that Artemis killed her on the island, on the evidence of Dionysus. The Roman poet Catullus writes a long and moving lament in which Ariadne curses him, and that curse is what comes next.
Because he forgets something. Before leaving Athens, Theseus and his father agreed on a signal. The ship set out with black sails, for the grief of the tribute. If Theseus succeeded, he was to change them to white on the way home, so that Aegeus, watching from the cliff, would know his son was alive. Theseus forgets. The ship returns with black sails still flying. Aegeus, seeing them, assumes his son is dead, and throws himself into the sea. That is why it is called the Aegean.
Plutarch, writing centuries later, says simply that he forgot. Catullus says it was the curse. Either way, notice what the story does. The hero who beat the Minotaur, who found his way out of the Labyrinth with a thread, who killed half a dozen bandits, loses his father because he cannot remember a colour. His great achievement is wiped out by a lapse. And he has just left behind the woman whose own gift of memory, a thread to trace the path back, made the whole thing possible.
The king who built a city
After that he becomes king, and this is the other half of his usefulness to Athens. According to Thucydides and Plutarch, Theseus is the man who unified the scattered villages of Attica into a single city-state, a process the Greeks called synoecism. He gave up much of his own royal power, set up a council, and invited everyone into one political community. Later Athenians, especially in the fifth century, liked to think of him as the founding ancestor of their democracy. In Euripides' play Suppliants, he speaks about the city as a free place, with no tyrant.
That is a lot of weight for a mythical character to carry. And the Athenians knew how much work they needed to do to make it stick. In 475 BCE, the general Cimon sailed to the island of Skyros, where Theseus was said to have died, and found a grave with a large skeleton and a bronze spear. He brought the bones home to Athens in triumph, and the city built a shrine for them. Plutarch tells the whole story. Athens went out and dug up its own founder.
Think about that. A city that needed a hero found his body, because, I believe, the memory was not strong enough on its own. It had to be backed by something you could carry through the streets.
The chair
The later part of his career is, frankly, a series of bad decisions. He abducts the young Helen, long before the Trojan War, and hides her. He joins his friend Pirithous in an attempt to kidnap Persephone herself from the Underworld. This is the part that fascinates me most. In Apollodorus, Hades invites the two heroes to sit down and rest. The chair they are given is the Chair of Forgetfulness. They sit, and they cannot get up, because the seat has grown into their flesh.
Heracles, on his last labour, fetches Theseus out of it and tears away part of his body in the process. Pirithous is left behind forever.
A chair of forgetfulness. A hero is held in place by the very quality he has shown all along. It is a wonderfully on-the-nose image, and I do not think the Greeks missed it. Memory in this culture was a divine power. The Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, which means Memory. To be stuck on the chair of the opposite is to be taken out of the story.
The end, and the ship
When Theseus returns from the Underworld, things have fallen apart. His sons are in exile, his wife Phaedra has fallen in love with his son Hippolytus, and the resulting disaster, ends with Theseus calling down a curse on his own son and living to regret it. The city turns against him. He leaves Athens and goes to Skyros, where its king, Lycomedes, either fears him or wants his land, and pushes him off a cliff.
That is a lonely end for a founder, and I think it is deliberate. The same city that put him at the centre of its identity admitted in its own stories that he was careless, selfish and, in the end, discarded.
And yet the Athenians kept his ship. Plutarch says that the thirty-oared vessel in which Theseus sailed to Crete was preserved in Athens for centuries, in the care of the city. As its planks rotted, they were replaced one by one with new timber, until philosophers began to ask whether it was still the same ship. Some argued that it was, and some that it had become something else. That is where we get the Ship of Theseus, a puzzle people still argue about.
I find this the most revealing detail of all. The Athenians tried so hard to remember Theseus that they maintained his boat plank by plank, until nothing original was left, and then they argued over whether the thing they had kept was him.
What it adds up to
So here is how I read it. Theseus is not really a hero of strength. His strength is ordinary by the standards of his world. His real function is to be a hero of memory, a man the city had to keep reinventing, and the stories seem to know it. Every important turn in his life is a failure to remember: a signal, a lover, a son, a seat. Every important thing the city did for him is an act of remembering: the bones, the shrine, the ship.
That is, I think, a surprisingly honest piece of civic mythmaking. A city that builds itself a founder and then fills his story with forgetting seems to be admitting that founders are fragile, and that the people who come after have to hold on tightly, and keep replacing the planks.
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