The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (78 page)

d
. Some say that when the roast beef was served in the Dolphin Temple, Theseus ostentatiously drew his sword, as if to carve, and thus attracted his father’s attention; but others, that he had unsuspectingly raised the cup to his lips before Aegeus noticed the Erechtheid serpents carved on the ivory sword-hilt and dashed the poison to the floor. The spot where the cup fell is still shown, barred off from the rest of the temple.

e
. Then followed the greatest rejoicing that Athens had ever known. Aegeus embraced Theseus, summoned a public assembly, and acknowledged him as his son. He lighted fires on every altar and heaped the gods’ images with gifts; hecatombs of garlanded oxen were sacrificed and, throughout the palace and the city, nobles and commoners feasted together, and sang of Theseus’s glorious deeds that already outnumbered the years of his life.
⁴

f
. Theseus then went in vengeful pursuit of Medea, who eluded him by casting a magic cloud about herself; and presently left Athens with young Medus, and an escort which Aegeus generously provided. But some say that she fled with Polyxenus, her son by Jason.
⁵

g
. Pallas and his fifty sons, who even before this had declared that Aegeus was not a true Erechtheid and thus had no right to the throne, broke into open revolt when this footloose stranger threatened to baulk their hopes of ever ruling Athens. They divided their forces: Pallas with twenty-five of his sons and numerous retainers marched against the city from the direction of Sphettus, while the other twenty-five lay in ambush at Gargettus. But Theseus, informed of their plans by a herald named Leos, of the Agnian clan, sprang the ambush and destroyed the entire force. Pallas thereupon disbanded his command, and sued for peace. The Pallantids have never forgotten Leos’s treachery, and still will not intermarry with the Agnians nor allow any herald to begin a proclamation with the words ‘
Akouete leoi!
’ (‘Hearken, ye people!’), because of the resemblance which
leoi
bears to the name of Leos.
⁶

h
. This Leos must be distinguished from the other Leos, Orpheus’s son, and ancestor of the Athenian Leontids. Once, in a time of famine and plague, Leos obeyed the Delphic Oracle by sacrificing his daughters Theope, Praxithea, and Eubule to save the city. The Athenians set up the Leocorium in their honour.
⁷

1
. Pausanias: i. 37. 3 and 19. 1; Plutarch:
Theseus
12.

2
. Euripides:
Medea
660 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 9. 28.

3
. Plutarch:
Theseus
12; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 6; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vii. 402 ff.

4
. Plutarch:
loc. cit.
; Ovid:
loc. cit.

5
. Ovid:
loc. cit.
; Apollodorus:
loc. cit.
; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55. 6; Hellanicus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 3. 7.

6
. Plutarch:
Theseus
13.

7
. Pausanias: i. 5. 2; Suidas
sub
Leos; Aristides:
Panathenian Oration
; Jerome:
AgainstJovinianus
p. 185, ed. Mart; Suidas
sub
Leocorium; Aelian:
Varia Historia
xii. 28.

1
. This artificial romance with its theatrical
dénouement
in the poisoning scene recalls that of Ion (see
44.
a
); and the incident of the ox tossed into the air seems merely a crude imitation of Heracles’s feats. The masons’ question is anachronistic, because in the heroic age young women
went about unescorted; neither could Theseus have been mistaken for a girl if he had already dedicated his hair to Apollo and become one of the Curetes. Yet the story’s weaknesses suggest that it has been deduced from an ancient icon which, since the men on the temple roof were recognizably masons, will have shown a sacrifice performed on the day when the temple was completed (see
84.
1
). It is likely that the figure, taken for Theseus, who unyokes the sacrificial white ox from a cart, is a priestess; and that, because of its dolphin decorations, the temple has been misread as Apollo’s, though the dolphin was originally an emblem of the Moon-goddess. The beast has not been tossed into the air. It is the deity in whose honour the sacrifice is being offered: either a white moon-cow, the goddess herself, or the white bull of Poseidon (see
88.
c
), who shared a shrine on the Acropolis with Athene and to whom, as Sea-god, dolphins were sacred; Apollo’s priests, Plutarch not the least, were always zealous to enhance his power and authority at the expense of other deities. A companion icon, from which the story of the poisoned cup will have been deduced – aconite was a well-known paralysant – probably showed a priest or priestess pouring a libation to the ghosts of the men sacrificed when the foundations were laid, while Persephone and Cerberus stand by. Plutarch describes Aegeus as living in the Dolphin Temple rather than a private house; and this is correct since, as sacred king, he had apartments in the Queen’s palace (see
25.
7
).

2
. Medea’s expulsion first from Corinth, and then from Athens, refers to the Hellenic suppression of the Earth-goddess’s cult – her serpent chariot shows her to be a Corinthian Demeter (see
24.
m
). Theseus’s defeat of the Pallantids similarly refers to the suppression of the original Athene cult (see
9.
1
and
16.
3
), with its college of fifty priestesses –
pallas
can mean either ‘youth’ or ‘maiden’. Still another version of the same story is the sacrifice of Leos’s three daughters, who are really the goddess in triad. The Maiden is Theope (‘divine face’), the New Moon; the Nymph is Praxithea (‘active goddess’), the Queen-bee. Cecrops’s mother bore the same name in Euboea (Apollodorus: iii. 15.
1
and
5
); the Crone is Eubule (‘good counsel’), the oracular goddess, whom Eubuleus the swineherd served at Eleusis.

3
. That Pallantids and Agnians refrained from inter-marriage may have been a relic of exogamy, with its complex system of group-marriage between phratries, each phratry or sub-phratry consisting of several totem clans: if so, Pallantids and Agnians will have belonged to the same sub-phratry, marriage being permitted only between members of different ones (see
80.
5
). The Pallantid clan probably had a goat for its totem, as the Agnians had a lamb, the Leontids a lion, and the Erechtheids a serpent. Many other totem clans are hinted at in Attic mythology: among them, crow, nightingale, hoopoe, wolf, bear, and owl.

4
. To judge from the Theseus and Heracles myths, both Athene’s chief priestess at Athens, and Hera’s at Argos, belonged to a lion clan, into which they adopted sacred kings; and a gold ring found at Tiryns shows four lion-men offering libation vessels to a seated goddess, who must be Hera, since a cuckoo perches behind her throne (see
12.
4
). Despite the absence of lions in Crete, they figured there too as the Goddess’s beasts. Athene was not associated with the cuckoo but had several other bird epiphanies, which may be totemistic by origin. In Homer she appears as a sea-eagle (
Odyssey
iii. 371) and a swallow (
ibid
. xxii. 239); in company with Apollo, as a vulture (
Iliad
vii. 58); and in company with Hera, as a dove (
ibid
v. 778). In a small Athenian vase of 500
B
.
C
. she is shown as a lark; and Athene the diver-bird, or gannet, had a shrine near Megara (Pausanias: i. 5. 3. and 41. 6 – see
94.
c
). But the wise owl was her principal epiphany. The owl clan preserved their ritual until late Classical times: initiates in owl-disguise would perform a ceremony of catching their totem bird (Aelian:
Varia Historia
xv. 28; Pollux: iv. 103; Athenaeus: 391a–b and 629f).

5
. Plutarch’s story of
Akouete leoi
is plausible enough: it often happened in primitive religions that words were banned because they sounded like the name of a person, object, or animal, which could not be safely mentioned; especially words suggesting the names of dead kinsmen, even if they had come to a natural end.

6
. The Pallantids’ denial that Aegeus and Theseus were true Erechtheids may reflect a sixth-century protest at Athens against the usurpation of the immigrant Butadae (who refurbished the Theseus legend) of the native Erechtheid priesthood (see
95.
3
).

98

THESEUS IN CRETE

I
T
is a matter of dispute whether Medea persuaded Aegeus to send Theseus against Poseidon’s ferocious white bull, or whether it was after her expulsion from Athens that he undertook the destruction of this fire-breathing monster, hoping thereby to ingratiate himself further with the Athenians. Brought by Heracles from Crete, let loose on the plain of Argos, and driven thence across the Isthmus to Marathon, the bull had killed men by the hundred between the cities of Probalinthus and Tricorynthus, including (some say) Minos’s son Androgeus. Yet Theseus boldly seized those murderous horns and dragged the bull
in triumph through the streets of Athens, and up the steep slope of the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it to Athene, or to Apollo.
¹

b
. As he approached Marathon, Theseus had been hospitably entertained by a needy old spinster named Hecale, or Hecalene, who vowed a ram to Zeus if he came back safely. But she died before his return, and he instituted the Hecalesian Rites, to honour her and Zeus Hecaleius, which are still performed today. Because Theseus was no more than a boy at this time, Hecale had caressed him with childish endearments, and is therefore commonly called by the diminutive Hecalene, rather than Hecale.
²

c
. In requital for the death of Androgeus, Minos gave orders that the Athenians should send seven youths and seven maidens every ninth year – namely at the close of every Great Year – to the Cretan Labyrinth, where the Minotaur waited to devour them. This Minotaur, whose name was Asterius, or Asterion, was the bull-headed monster which Pasiphaë had borne to the white bull.
³
Soon after Theseus’s arrival at Athens the tribute fell due for the third time, and he so deeply pitied those parents whose children were liable to be chosen by lot, that he offered himself as one of the victims, despite Aegeus’s earnest attempts at dissuasion. But some say that the lot had fallen on him. According to others, King Minos came in person with a large fleet to choose the victims; his eye lighted on Theseus who, though a native of Troezen, not Athens, volunteered to come on the understanding that if he conquered the Minotaur with his bare hands the tribute would be remitted.
⁴

d
. On the two previous occasions, the ship which conveyed the fourteen victims had carried black sails, but Theseus was confident that the gods were on his side, and Aegeus therefore gave him a white sail to hoist on return, in signal of success; though some say that it was a red sail, dyed in juice of the kerm-oak berry.
⁵