The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (77 page)

1
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Plutarch:
Theseus
7 and 11.

2
. Hyginus:
Fabula
38; Apollodorus: iii. 16. 1; Pausanias: ii. 1. 4; Plutarch:
Theseus
8.

3
. Pausanias:
loc. cit
.; Ovid:
Ibis
507 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 16. 2; Scholiast on Euripides’s
Hippolytus
977.

4
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vii. 433 ff.; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
loc. cit
.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Pausanias:
loc. cit
.

5
. Plutarch:
Theseus
8 and 29.

6
.
Parian Marble
35 ff; Plutarch:
Theseus
25.

7
. Plutarch:
Theseus
9; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vii. 433 ff.; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 1; Hyginus:
Fabula
38.

8
. Strabo: ix. 1. 4; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 2; Plutarch:
Theseus
25.

9
. Scholiast on Statius’s
Thebaid
i. 339; Pausanias: i. 44. 12; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 2–3.

10
. Plutarch:
Theseus
10 and 25.

11
. Pausanias: i. 44. 10–12; Strabo: ix. 1. 4.

12
. Scholiast on Aristophanes’s
Parliament of Women
18; Aristophanes:
Wasps
925;
Etymologicum Magnum
:
sub
Scirophorion.

13
. Plutarch:
Theseus
11; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 3; Hyginus:
Fabula
38; Aulus Gellius: xiii. 21.

14
. Ovid:
Ibis
407 ff.; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: i. 39. 3; Plutarch:
Theseus
11 and 29.

15
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 4; Pausanias: i. 38. 5; Hyginus:
Fabula
38; Plutarch:
Theseus
11.

1
. The killing of Periphetes has been invented to account for Theseus’s brass-bound club, like the one carried by Heracles (see 120.
5
). Periphetes is described as a cripple because he was the son of Daedalus the smith, and smiths were often ritually lamed (see
92.
1
).

2
. Since the North Wind, which bent the pines, was held to fertilize women, animals, and plants, ‘Pityocamptes’ is described as the father of Perigune, a cornfield-goddess (see
48.
1
). Her descendants’ attachment to wild asparagus and rushes suggests that the sacred baskets carried in the Thesmophoria Festival were woven from these, and therefore tabooed for ordinary use. The Crommyonian Sow,
alias
Phaea, is the white Sow-Demeter (see
24.
7
and
74.
4
), whose cult was early suppressed in the Peloponnese. That Theseus went out of his way to kill a mere sow troubled the mythographers: Hyginus and Ovid, indeed, make her a boar, and Plutarch describes her as a woman bandit whose disgusting
behaviour earned her the nickname of ‘sow’. But she appears in early Welsh myth as the Old White Sow, Hen Wen, tended by the swineherd magician Coll ap Collfrewr, who introduced wheat and bees into Britain; and Demeter’s swineherd magician Eubuleus was remembered in the Thesmophoria Festival at Eleusis, when live pigs were flung down a chasm in his honour. Their rotting remains later served to fertilize the seed-corn (Scholiast on Lucian’s
Dialogues Between Whores
ii. 1).

3
. The stories of Sciron and Cercyon are apparently based on a series of icons which illustrated the ceremony of hurling a sacred king as a
pharmacos
from the White Rock. The first hero who had met his death here was Melicertes (see
70.
h
), namely Heracles Melkarth of Tyre who seems to have been stripped of his royal trappings – club, lion-skin, and buskins – and then provided with wings, live birds, and a parasol to break his fall (see
89.
6
;
92.
3
; and
98.
7
). This is to suggest that Sciron, shown making ready to kick a traveller into the sea, is the
pharmacos
being prepared for his ordeal at the Scirophoria, which was celebrated in the last month of the year, namely at midsummer; and that a second scene, explained as Theseus’s wrestling with Cercyon, shows him being lifted off his feet by his successor (as in the terracotta of the Royal Colonnade at Athens – Pausanias: i. 3. 1), while the priestess of the goddess looks on delightedly. This is a common mythological situation: Heracles, for instance, wrestled for a kingdom with Antaeus in Libya (see 133.
h
), and with Eryx in Sicily (see 132.
q
); Odysseus with Philomeleides on Tenedos see 161.
f
). A third scene, taken for Theseus’s revenge on Sciron, shows the
pharmacos
hurtling through the air, parasol in hand. In a fourth, he has reached the sea, and his parasol is floating on the waves – the supposed turtle, waiting to devour him, was surely the parasol, since there is no record of an Attic turtle cult. The Second Vatican Mythographer (127) makes Daedalus, not Theseus, kill Sciron, probably because of Daedalus’s mythic connexion with the
pharmacos
ritual of the partridge king (see
92.
3
).

4
. All these feats of Theseus’s seem to be interrelated. Grammarians associate the white parasol with a gypsum image of Athene. This recalls the white
pharmacos
dolls, called ‘Argives’ (‘white men’), thrown into running water once a year at the May purification of temples (see 132.
p
); also the white cakes shaped like pigs, and made of flour mixed with gypsum (Pliny:
Natural History
xvii. 29. 2), which were used in the Thesmophoria to replace the pig remains recovered from Eubuleus’s chasm – ‘in order not to defraud his sacred serpents’, explains the scholiast on Lucian’s
Dialogues Between Whores
. The Scirophoria Festival formed part of the Thesmophoria.
Thes
has the same meaning in
Thesmophoria
as in
Theseus
: namely ‘tokens deposited’ – in the baskets woven of wild asparagus and rush which Perigune sanctified. They were phallic tokens
and the festival was an erotic one: this is justified by Theseus’s seduction of Perigune, and also by Hermes’s seduction of Herse (see
25.
d
). The priest of Erechtheus carried a parasol, because he was the president of the serpent cult, and the sacred functions of the ancient kings rested with him after the monarchy had been abolished: as they rested at Rome with the Priest of Zeus.

5
. Cercyon’s name connects him with the pig cult. So does his parentage: Branchus refers to the grunting of pigs, and Argiope is a synonym for Phaea. It will have been Poseidon’s son Theseus who ravished Alope: that is to say, suppressed the worship of the Megarean Moon-goddess as Vixen (see
49.
2
).

6
. Sinis and Sciron are both described as the hero in whose honour the Isthmian Games were rededicated; Sinis’s nickname was Pityocamptes; and Sciron, like Pityocamptes, was a north-westerly wind. But since the Isthmian Games had originally been founded in memory of Heracles Melkarth, the destruction of Pityocamptes seems to record the suppression of the Boreas cult in Athens – which was, however, revived after the Persian Wars (see
48.
4
). In that case, the Isthmian Games are analogous to the Pythian Games, founded in memory of Python, who was both the fertilizing North Wind and the ghost of the sacred king killed by his rival Apollo. Moreover, ‘Procrustes’, according to Ovid and the scholiast on Euripides’s
Hippolytus
(977), was only another nickname for Sinis-Pityocamptes; and Procrustes seems to be a fictional character, invented to account for a familiar icon: the hair of the old king – Samson, Pterelaus (see
89.
7
), Nisus (see
91.
1
), Curoi, Llew Llaw, or whatever he may have been called – is tied to the bedpost by his treacherous bride, while his rival advances, axe in hand, to destroy him. ‘Theseus’ and his Hellenes abolished the custom of throwing the old king over the Molurian Rock, and rededicated the Games to Poseidon at Ino’s expense, Ino being one of Athene’s earlier titles.

97

THESEUS AND MEDEA

A
RRIVED
in Attica, Theseus was met beside the River Cephissus by the sons of Phytalus, who purified him from the blood he had spilled, but especially from that of Sinis, a maternal kinsman of his. The altar of Gracious Zeus, where this ceremony was performed, still stands by the riverside. Afterwards, the Phytalids welcomed Theseus as their guest, which was the first true hospitality he had received since leaving
Troezen. Dressed in a long garment that reached to his feet and with his hair neatly plaited, he entered Athens on the eighth day of the month Cronius, now called Hecatomboeon. As he passed the nearly-completed temple of Apollo the Dolphin, a group of masons working on the roof mistook him for a girl, and impertinently asked why he was allowed to wander about unescorted. Disdaining to reply, Theseus unyoked the oxen from the masons’ cart and tossed one of them into the air, high above the temple roof.
¹

b
. Now while Theseus was growing up in Troezen, Aegeus had kept his promise to Medea. He gave her shelter in Athens when she fled from Corinth in the celebrated chariot drawn by winged serpents, and married her, rightly confident that her spells would enable him to beget an heir; for he did not yet know that Aethra had borne him Theseus.
²

c
. Medea, however, recognised Theseus as soon as he arrived in the city, and grew jealous on behalf of Medus, her son by Aegeus, who was generally expected to succeed him on the Athenian throne. She therefore persuaded Aegeus that Theseus came as a spy or an assassin, and had him invited to a feast at the Dolphin Temple; Aegeus, who used the temple as his residence, was then to offer him a cup of wine already prepared by her. This cup contained wolfsbane, a poison which she had brought from Bithynian Acherusia, where it first sprang from the deadly foam scattered by Cerberus when Heracles dragged him out of Tartarus; because wolfsbane flourishes on bare rocks, the peasants call it ‘aconite’.
³