Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter II: Heroes & Their Quests
Theseus and the Minotaur: The Hero of Athens and Crete
Theseus and the Minotaur explained: his youth at Troezen, the road to Athens, Ariadne and the Labyrinth of Minos, his kingship, his death, and Knossos.
Theseus was the national hero of Athens, best known for killing the Minotaur, the bull-headed son of the queen of Crete, in the Labyrinth built by Daedalus for King Minos. With the help of Minos' daughter Ariadne and her thread he found his way out again, freed Athens from a tribute of young men and women, and became king. Athenians credited him with uniting Attica into one city, and from the sixth century BCE they shaped him into a rival to Heracles and a model of their own democracy.
The Birth and Youth of Theseus at Troezen§
King Aegeus of Athens was childless. The Delphic oracle told him not to loosen the foot of his wineskin until he reached home, a riddle he did not understand. On his way back he stopped at Troezen in the north-eastern Peloponnese, where the wise king Pittheus grasped its meaning and arranged for Aegeus to sleep with his daughter Aethra. That same night, in several versions, Poseidon also lay with her, so that Theseus could be called the son of both.
Before leaving, Aegeus hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock and told Aethra that, if she bore a son strong enough to lift it, she should send him to Athens with these tokens. Theseus grew up at Troezen, and when he came of age he lifted the rock with ease and took the sword and sandals.
The Road to Athens and the Return to Aegeus§
Rather than sail safely across the Saronic Gulf, Theseus chose the dangerous land road around the Isthmus of Corinth, deliberately imitating his kinsman Heracles. On the way he killed a series of bandits, each by his own method: Periphetes the club-man at Epidaurus, whose bronze club Theseus then carried; Sinis the Pine-bender at the Isthmus; the wild sow of Crommyon; Sciron, who kicked travellers off a cliff to a giant turtle; the wrestler Cercyon at Eleusis; and Procrustes, who stretched or cut his guests to fit his bed. Painters of Athenian red-figure cups in the late sixth century BCE set these "deeds of Theseus" in a ring, as a deliberate counterpart to the labours of Heracles.
At Athens, Aegeus had married the sorceress Medea, who had fled from Corinth after the events told in Jason, the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece. Recognising the newcomer, she persuaded the king to send him against the bull of Marathon and, when he returned victorious, to offer him a cup of poison at a feast. As Theseus drew his sword to carve the meat, Aegeus recognised it and dashed the cup away. Medea fled, and Theseus defeated his cousins, the fifty sons of Pallas, who had hoped to inherit the throne.
Minos, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth§
Minos, king of Crete, held Athens responsible for the death of his son Androgeos, killed in Attica, and imposed a penalty: seven young men and seven maidens to be sent to Crete, every nine years in Plutarch's account and yearly in others, to be devoured by the Minotaur. The monster's origin was a divine punishment. Minos had prayed to Poseidon for a bull as a sign of his right to rule and then failed to sacrifice it; Poseidon made his wife Pasiphaë desire the animal, and the craftsman Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow. The child was half man and half bull, called Asterion in Apollodorus. Minos had Daedalus build the Labyrinth, a structure so intricate that no one could find the way out, to hold him.
Theseus sailed with the victims, volunteering or chosen by lot depending on the source. Bacchylides' seventeenth ode tells how, on the voyage, Minos challenged his claim to be Poseidon's son by throwing a golden ring into the sea; Theseus dived after it and returned from the palace of the sea gods with a wreath from Amphitrite. In Crete, Ariadne fell in love with him and, on Daedalus' advice, gave him a ball of thread, the "clew", to unwind as he went in. He killed the Minotaur, with his fists in Apollodorus or a sword in most art, and followed the thread back to the entrance. The symbolism of the maze through later history is traced in The Labyrinth Symbol.
Ariadne on Naxos and the Death of Aegeus§
Theseus fled Crete with Ariadne and the young Athenians but left her on the island of Naxos (or Dia). Why he did so the sources disagree: he forgot her, he loved another, or the god Dionysus claimed her. The Odyssey says Artemis killed her on Dionysus' word; Hesiod and most later writers make her the god's bride. Catullus' poem 64 and Ovid's Heroides 10 give her abandoned lament, which became one of the great themes of European art and music.
Theseus had promised his father to change the ship's black sail to a white one if he returned alive. He forgot. Aegeus, watching from the Acropolis or a headland, saw the black sail and threw himself to his death; a later tradition named the Aegean Sea after him. On Delos, Theseus and the young people were said to have danced the geranos, the "crane dance", imitating the windings of the Labyrinth. The Athenians kept the ship of the voyage and sent it on a sacred embassy to Delos every year; Plutarch reports that it was preserved, its rotten timbers replaced one by one, until the late fourth century BCE, and philosophers used it as a puzzle about whether a thing that has had all its parts replaced remains the same thing.
Theseus as King: Synoecism, Amazons and Pirithous§
As king, Theseus was credited with the synoikismos, the unification of the scattered communities of Attica under one council at Athens; the historian Thucydides accepted this, and the festival of the Synoikia commemorated it. He was said to have founded or renewed the Panathenaia and given the city its first constitution. His adventures continued: he carried off the Amazon Antiope (or Hippolyta), fought off the Amazons' invasion of Attica, and fathered Hippolytus, whose death through the false accusation of Theseus' later wife Phaedra is the subject of Euripides' Hippolytus (428 BCE).
His great friend was Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, at whose wedding the drunken centaurs tried to carry off the bride, a battle shown on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia and on the Parthenon metopes. The two friends grew reckless. They abducted the young Helen of Sparta, later the cause of the Trojan War, and then went down to the underworld to carry off Persephone as a bride for Pirithous. Hades seated them on chairs that held them fast. Heracles freed Theseus but not his friend. Returning, Theseus found that Helen's brothers had rescued her and put a rival on the throne. He went into exile on Skyros, where King Lycomedes pushed him from a cliff.
Theseus, Athenian Identity and the Archaeology of Knossos§
Theseus' importance grew with Athens. Images of him multiply from the late sixth century BCE, perhaps encouraged by the Peisistratid tyrants or the reforms of Cleisthenes; the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (c. 500–490 BCE) set his deeds beside those of Heracles. After an oracle told the Athenians to recover his remains, Cimon found a large skeleton on Skyros and brought it to Athens in 476/5 BCE, where it was enshrined in the Theseion, which became a sanctuary for runaway slaves. In tragedy, as in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Theseus is the just king who protects suppliants. Plutarch paired his life with that of Romulus, the founder of Rome.
The setting of the Minotaur myth has invited archaeological interpretation since Arthur Evans began excavating at Knossos in 1900. The labyrinthine plan of the palace, bull-leaping frescoes and the double-axe sign (the labrys, which some scholars connect with the word "labyrinth") suggested to Evans a kernel of memory behind the myth; a Linear B tablet from Knossos records an offering to a "Mistress of the Labyrinth". These links remain debated. Evans' heavy reconstructions and his romantic picture of Minoan civilisation have been strongly criticised, notably in J. Alexander MacGillivray's Minotaur (2000), and most scholars treat the myth as a Greek story about Crete rather than a record of Bronze Age events.
Frequently asked questions§
How did Theseus escape the Labyrinth?§
Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, gave him a ball of thread on the advice of Daedalus. He tied it at the entrance, unwound it as he went in, killed the Minotaur and followed the thread back out.
Why did Theseus abandon Ariadne?§
Ancient sources disagree. Some say he forgot her, some that he loved another woman, and many that the god Dionysus claimed Ariadne as his bride and Theseus was made to leave her on Naxos.
Who was the Minotaur?§
The Minotaur was the son of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, and a bull sent by Poseidon, with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Minos kept him in the Labyrinth and fed him Athenian youths and maidens.
Was the Labyrinth a real place?§
No building matching the myth has been found. The palace of Knossos is complex and is often associated with the story, but whether the myth preserves any memory of it is uncertain.
Sources and further reading§
- Parallel Lives — Plutarch, c. 100 CE
- The Library — Apollodorus, 1st–2nd century CE
- Hippolytus — Euripides, 428 BCE
- Metamorphoses — Ovid, c. 8 CE
- The Palace of Minos at Knossos — Arthur Evans, 1921
- Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth — J. Alexander MacGillivray, 2000
- Theseus and Athens — Henry J. Walker, 1995
- Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire — Sophie Mills, 1997
- Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources — Timothy Gantz, 1993