Chapter Ten: Theseus

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Chapter Ten: Theseus (from Mythology for Today Hamilton’s Mythology) 1. Theseus must first prove his strength by lifting the great stone under which his father left him a sword and shoes. 2. Theseus refuses the sea voyage to Athens because it is too easy, and he is eager to do dangerous heroic deeds. 3. Theseus rids the dangerous road of various hazardous bandits and thieves, including Procrustes, Sciron, and Sinis. 4. Theseus’ idea of justice is “poetic justice,” in which the criminal is punished by the same crime he has done to others. 5. King Minos’ only son was killed when the Athenian king sent him on a dangerous mission. The devastated and angry Minos invaded Athens, and only spared it utter destruction because he was promised that every nine years he would be sent seven maidens and seven youths as a sacrificial tribute. The fourteen unfortunates would be devoured by the monstrous Minotaur. 6. Theseus has told his father that if he survives his battle with the Minotaur, he will change the ship’s sail from black to white, so that it would be known that he was alive and victorious. Theseus forgets this promise, and when his father sees the black sail and believes his son to be dead, he commits suicide. 7. Ariadne is Minos’ daughter. She falls in love with Theseus on first sight and gives him a clue to escape the Labyrinth: He must tie a ball of thread to the entrance, so that he can follow it back out the way he came in. 8. Theseus, made King of Athens, resigns royal power and installs a people’s government, a commonwealth with the principals of liberty and self‐ government. He takes the title of Commander in Chief, but it is the votes of the citizens that decide the governmental policies. 9. Theseus displays his generosity when he gives the despised and miserable Oedipus a welcome in his home; he is magnanimous in fighting for the burial of the Theban rebels while not letting them loot and pillage the conquered city; he stands by Hercules and convinces him not to take his own life after he has killed his family in a fit of madness; he helps his capricious friend Pirithous out of many misadventures. 10. Phaedra, Theseus’ new wife, falls in love with his son, Hippolytus, who is not interested in women and finds her guilty love for him repellent. Phaedra, realizing that he is disgusted by her, kills herself, but leaves a note for Theseus that attributes her suicide to the fact that Hippolytus has wronged her. Theseus, believing Phaedra’s note, banished his son, who is mortally wounded as he leaves for exile. Theseus finds out the truth before his son dies, and lives on in misery for some years before he, too, dies. .

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Hamilton's Theseus.Pdf
'1 I\!I, 208 Mythology lnstantlysaw his opportunity. He went straight to the pal- ace and entered the hall. As he stood at the entrance, Athena's shining buckler on his breast, the silver wallet at his side, he drew the eyes of every man there. Then before 1\' any could look away he held up the Gorgon's head; and at the sight one and all, the cruel King and his servile courtiers, were turned into stone. There they sat, a row of statues, each, ! as it were, frozen stiff in the attitude he had struck when he first saw Perseus. CHAPTER II When the islanders knew themselves freed from the tyrant it was-easyfot Perseus to find Danae and Dictys. He made Theseus Dictys king of the island, but he and his mother decided that This dearest of heroes to the Athenians engaged the atten- they would go back with Andromeda to Greece and try to tion of many writers. Ovid, who lived in the Augustan Age, be reconciled to Acrisius, to see if the many years that had tells his life in detail and so does Apollodorus, in the first or passed since he had put them in the chest had not softened second century A.D. Plutarch, too, toward the end of the fi·rst century A.D. He is a prominent character in three of Eurip- him so that he would be glad to receive his daughter and ides' plays and in one of Sophocles. There are many allusions grandson. When they reached Argos, however, they found to him in ptose writers as well as poets.
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