PJO MONTHLY MAGAZINES MAY

The Story of Theseus

In legend, Theseus' father was considered either the son of the god Poseidon or King Aegeus of Athens. His mother was Aethra, daughter of Pittheus, the king of Troezen, whom Aegeus seduced. Theseus spent his childhood at Troezen in the northeast of Peloponnese the as Aegeus had warned Aethra not to tell her son who his real father was until he came of age, perhaps explaining why Theseus was considered the son of Poseidon in his youth. When a young adult, the hero gathered up gifts of sandals and a sword from his father which had been buried under a heavy rock for when he was old enough to lift it. With these tokens Theseus set off for Athens to claim, as Aegeus' only son, his inheritance, the kingdom of Athens. Before he could reach the city, though, he first had to battle various villains and monsters.

The first villain to be dispatched was Periphetes, who smashed the heads of anyone he came across with a huge iron club. Theseus killed him without ceremony and took his club as a handy weapon for his future adventures. A similar baddy was Sinis (also Sines) who hung around Corinth the countryside and bent pine trees so that they might strike and kill people who passed through the Isthmus. Our hero killed the troublesome Sinis using, of course, a bent pine tree. According to Plutarch, Theseus had a son, Melanippus, by Sinis' daughter Perigune.

Next came Skiron who blocked the narrow sea passage through the rocks of Megara. He took delight in forcing people to wash his feet and when they bent down to do so he would kick them over the cliff and into the sea. Whether the unfortunate travellers survived the fall or not was irrelevant as, in any case, they were then eaten by a giant turtle that haunted those parts. All this frightful behavior was put to an end by Theseus who kicked Skiron into the sea to be eaten by his own accomplice or, in another version, to be turned into a rock.

Next in line came Kerkyon, the champion wrestler who crushed to death anyone who passed his way, but Theseus beat him at his own sport. The last scoundrel was Prokroustes (also Procrustes or Damastes) who waylaid travellers and forced them onto a bed; if they were too tall for the bed he would chop off the excess, if they were too short he would stretch them using weights or hammer their limbs to increase their length. Theseus swiftly dealt with him too by putting him on his own device.

Finished with littering the Greek countryside with dead villains, Theseus then had to kill a bad-tempered sow called Phaia which was causing trouble, again, in the Corinth area. He finally did arrive at Athens, where he was not helped by his jealous step-mother Medea. She and Theseus' cousins, the Pallantidae, tried several times to do away with our hero but their ambushes and poisonings came to nothing. Medea then sent Theseus off on the dangerous errand of dealing with the bull of Marathon which was terrorizing the countryside. The hero captured the animal and sacrificed it to Apollo. In yet more adventures, Theseus even found time to help Meleager in the Calydonian Boar hunt and to accompany Jason and his Argonauts on their quest to find the Golden Fleece, but his greatest trial was yet to come.

Theseus' most famous adventure was his slaying of the Minotaur of King Minos on Crete. Every year (or every nine, according to Plutarch) Athens was compelled to send seven young men and seven young women to feed this fearsome creature with a man's body and the head of a bull, which dwelt in the mysterious at Labyrinth, built by the famed architect .Daedalus. The terrible tribute was, in some sources, compensation for the death of Minos' son Androgeous, killed by jealous competitors after he won at the Athenian Games (in other versions he was killed by the bull of Marathon). The unique Minotaur came from the union of Minos' wife Pasiphae and a bull after the queen was made to fall in love with the animal by Zeus as revenge for Minos' refusal to sacrifice it in the god's honour.

Theseus, seeking to put a stop to this barbarity, enrolled himself as one of the seven youths and sailed to Crete. On the way, our hero, with the help of Amphitrite, Poseidon's wife, retrieved a ring which had been thrown into the sea by Minos. On arrival Theseus fearlessly entered the lair of the Minotaur from which no one had ever come out alive. There, with the help of Adriane, daughter of Minos, the hero marked his way through the winding passages of the labyrinth using a ball of string. Striking down the beast with his sword, he easily followed the string back to the labyrinth's entrance and freed Athens from her terrible obligation to Minos.

Sailing back to Athens, Theseus rather ungallantly abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos, perhaps on the advice of Athena, but she soon found solace in the arms of the god of wine Dionysus, whom she married.

Theseus then sailed on home but was hit by tragedy when he forgot, as he had promised to his father before setting off, to hoist a white sail instead of the usual black one (set as a of mourning for the doomed youths) which would signal to his waiting father that all was well. Theseus' father saw the black sail, thought his son had been killed by the Minotaur and, utterly distraught, threw himself off the cliff into the sea below. Thereafter, the sea carried his name, the Aegean. Theseus thus inherited the throne and he settled down to government, unifying the many small settlements of the area into a single political unit (synoecism), and establishing a peaceful and prosperous period for Athens.

Rest of Theseus' life next edition. Also there has been a slight problem and the Proposal ring story has not been edited in this edition. It will resume from next edition (I am like 95% sure), and so, instead of it, we are publishing the story of Theseus.

~Crew of ~