by Jack Lindsay
Theseus was mainly a daimōn of puberty initiations with its tests and ordeals, as in a larger way Herakles was. The tales told about these heroes may be often interpreted as fantasies born of those tests and given a free expression in shamanist performances. (Shamanist ritual and myth, concerned much with danger points in the spirit journey to the other-world, are in general an elaboration of ordeal experiences in a traditional but also a personally imaginative way.) After Sinis, Theseus came to Krommyon (Onion) where he had to fight an Old Woman’s Sow, named after her Phaia, the Grey or Dark One: again an otherworld figure. In such an exploit there is often the passage into a Cave past an Old Woman or Sibyl. Theseus at his journey’s end again came up against tree-magic. At the point where the Sacred Way crossed the Kephisos, the clan of Phytalidai received and purified him. Their founding ancestor Phytalos (Planter) had shown hospitality to Demeter and been given the first figtree. The purification (for the persons he had killed) was at the altar of Zeus Meilichios (Gracious) of the underworld, to whom the fig was sacred. This Zeus, called Zeus Hades by Euripides, was depicted as a snake; he was a sort of Ploutos and had some of the characteristics of the Erinyes, being an avenger of kindred blood; his sacrifice of pigs was a holocaust offered at night, his festival a time of stygian Gloom.[342]
Theseus appears openly as a hell-harrower, like Herakles, in his adventures with Peirithoos. The latter was also a son of Zeus, in stallion form, and a brother of the centaurs; like the Dioskouroi he thus had strong horse-elements. Though Thessalian, he became linked with Theseus; and the folk of Attika, especially of the deme Peirithoidai, honoured him as their hero. The story ran that, hearing of Theseus’ fame, he went to drive off one of his cowherds; he was thus also a cattle-raider like the Twins. Theseus caught him up, but the two men, admiring one another, did not fight. Peirithoos offered to pay a fine, but Theseus instead proposed that they be friends. They confirmed their pact with an oath at Kolonos, where a rock-hollow was shown as their mixing-bowl. They decided that each of them must get a daughter of Zeus as wife. They drew lots and Helen fell to Theseus. They carried her off, and then, leaving her at Aphidna, went down into the underworld to get its queen Persephone. Their descent was said to have been made at Tainaron where Herakles also went down. They did not find Charon at his usual harbour on the Acheron, but somehow got across. When they reached Hades, he bade them sit on thrones hewn out of rock by the gate of his palace while he fetched them gifts; but what he gave was the Waters of Lethe. The pair sat as if fettered, oblivious. When Herakles passed, they could only stretch out their hands. They are described as bound down by snakes or by hundreds of chains, or as grown into the rock. (A later comic account tells how Theseus left part of his backside behind when Herakles pulled him up.) Odysseus in the account of his underworld visit says, ‘I should have yet seen others of the men of former days whom I wanted to see, yes, Theseus and Peirithoos, glorious children of the gods, but the myriad tribes of the dead came crowding up with an awful [inhuman, divinely sounding] cry, and pale fear gripped me lest august Persephone should send out at me from the house of Hades the head of that terrible monster Gorgeie [Gorgon].’ We have here a suggestive sequence: first the pair, now gone below in death, and then a monster that turns to stone, who is controlled by Persephone. Stories of Herakles state that only Theseus could be awakened and rescued; but old accounts made Peirithoos also escape, though when dead he returned to his punishment. There seems a confusion of traditions. In the original version perhaps the heroes failed and were doomed to stay underground; but as they were needed in other stories to continue their exploits, they had somehow to be rescued.
In the legend Helen is paired off with Persephone as the bride to be carried off. From one angle such tales of women being carried off by the gods repeat the Korē tale, with an ultimate reference to the imagery and ritual of the earth-goddess’s death-rebirth, descent-ascent. The source of all fertility and desirability is carried off below; she returns with the reviving spring. Helen then is here revealed as an ancient earthmother of vegetation, dying and reborn, ravished away and returning to the light of earth.[343]
A rationalized version of the Theseus episode was told, which shows how ritual myth could be turned into saga. Aidoneus (Hades), king of the Molossians, was married to a woman named Persephone; they had a daughter Korē and a dog Kerberos. Suitors for Korē had to fight the ferocious dog. When Theseus and Peirithoos arrived, the king heard that they meant to carry Korē off; so he arrested them. Peirithoos was handed over to the dog, who devoured him. Theseus was put in jail. Pausanias accepts the rationalized version as the original, from which the myth was derived. ‘I believe it was because Homer had seen these places that he was so bold as to describe in his poem the regions of Hades, and gave to the rivers there the names of those in Thesprotia.’[344]
If we knew more of the way in which the sacred marriage was mimed in Greek ritual in early days (presumably by priest and priestess or perhaps even by the lad and the girl initiates who had been victors in some agōnes), we would be in a better position to argue as to whether the carrying-off myths directly reflected a ritual event and experience. The pair who might have represented Zeus and Hera in a sacred union at Olympia were the male winner of the chariot-race and the winner of the maidens’ race at the Heraia. In countless folktales the hero who passes certain tests wins the coveted bride; and in spring rites we find the young man carrying off the dance-leader of the girls after he has defeated the old man, her husband who is also the old year. We cannot cite a rite from ancient Greece which embodies all these elements. But at Eleutherai in Attika there was the legend of a fight between Xanthos (Fair Man) and Melanthos (Black Man), linked with the cult of Dionysos of the Black Goatskin — though it was Melanthos who won, and the cult was probably of the vintage, not of the spring. (It was said to have been instituted by Eleuthēr to save his daughters from madness sent upon them because they ‘saw an apparition of Dionysos wearing a black goatskin and they reviled him’.) The theme of winning a coveted bride however, does appear in the kōmos or revel of Old Comedy, as when at the end of The Birds Peisthetairos as the new Zeus marries Basileia, no doubt suggesting to the audience the yearly ritual marriage of Dionysos to the Queen or Basilissa, wife of the official known as the King Archon, perhaps held at the Anthesteria.[345]
As an example of the kind of initiation experience that could be reflected in certain myths of abduction we may consider the carrying-off of the kleinoi in Crete which we already noted: a mock (homosexual) marriage by capture of a boy and an older male. The latter’s friends were warned three or four days before-hand; and as long as the abductor was the boy’s social equal or superior, the pursuing friends, on catching up with the pair, seized the boy in a playful way and handed him back to the ravisher. The boy was conducted to the latter’s Men’s House, where he was given gifts and then taken away into the country. The others followed, and hunts and feasts went on for two months; then they all returned to the city. The boy was released with the customary gifts (military costume, drinking-cup, ox). The young initiate then sacrificed the ox to Zeus and gave a feast to the participants in the abduction rite. To fail to be thus carried off was a disgrace; and the abducted boys or parastathentes (those-set-beside) continued to gain special favours, wearing fine clothes presented by their lovers and being allowed positions of the highest honour in dances and races. Even when grown to manhood, they wore a distinctive dress and were kleinoi. Such tales as that of the abduction of Ganymedes by Zeus seem to derive from customs like this from Crete. Plato says that his myth originated in Crete and there was a tradition that the abductor was Minos. It is indeed possible that the custom in Crete went back to Minoan days, and that abducted boys of the noble class served as cup-bearers in the palace. Perhaps girls too. Hebe, who shared the cup-bearing office on Olympos, was honoured at Phlious as Ganymeda. (The name Ganymedes might then represent a group, as did the term kleinoi.) We may note further that kleinoi of a similar age, when leaving
their fraternity or agela, were all married at the same time. Sparta had a similar institution called boua or ox-herd.[346]
We may now turn to Theseus in Crete. Minos had a grudge against Athens, his son having been killed by the Marathonian Bull (which Theseus later dealt with). He was on Paros making sacrifices to the Graces at the time, says Apollodoros; he tore the garland off his head and bade the flutes to stop. (After that the Parians discarded garlands and flutes in sacrifices to the Graces. We see that the tale was devised to explain this taboo.) Minos had a Labyrinth built by the craftsman Daidalos and put in it the bull-headed man borne by his queen Pasiphae to a bull. As lord of the sea, he forced Athens to pay a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens every ninth year. Theseus went as a member of the third group of his own free will. Bacchylides tells how on the voyage he bade Minos take his hands off one of the girls and boasted that if Minos was born of Zeus he himself was born of Poseidon. The King, to make him prove his words, threw a ring into the sea and bade him fetch it back. Theseus dived in and was welcomed by Triton, also Poseidon’s son, who led him to the palace in the depths. There Amphitrite clothed him in purple and set on his head a rose wreath, her marriage gift from Aphrodite. Theseus rose up out of the sea with the ring. A cup by Euphranor and a krater by the Kadmos painter show the underwater scene. The first depicts Amphitrite giving the crown or wreath, with Athena between her and the hero, while the second (last quarter of the fifth century) provides much more detail, the tripods on columns suggesting that it records a winning dithyramb. The wreath gift links Theseus with Aphrodite as his favourer and guide; it also connects Ariadne with Harmonia of the bridal necklace, and both these heroines with Helen.[347] The dive may be related to the sea-leap that occurs in many myths and seems to derive from Minoan cult-practices.[348]
In Crete Theseus wins over the princess Ariadne. In an old representation she spins while he stretches out his hand to her. Mistress of the guiding thread, she is a sort of spinning fate for him. Later writers say that she learned her thread device from Daidalos. She fastens the thread to the labyrinth entry and lets it unwind; Theseus catches the monster sleeping in his lair and sacrifices him to Poseidon. (In the struggle there seems some memory of Minoan bullfights and games.) Ariadne accompanies her lover, lighting up the darkness with her crown or wreath.
Vase painters however treat the crown as a mere decorative item. It is apparently the crown which Theseus got in the sea-depths; Ariadne’s possession of it was later explained by making it the price of her virginity. (In one version Aphrodite bestowed it on Ariadne. She too had her crown. The smaller Hymn describes her toilet by the gold-filleted Hours, who ‘put on her head a well-wrought crown of gold’, with earrings in her pierced ears and necklaces round her throat. The crown was the work of the god Hephaistos who had lived nine years under the sea with Thetis, where he made a golden amphora for Dionysos, who gave it to Thetis.[349])
One vase shows Theseus grasping the monster, labelled Taurominion, with one hand, a sword in the other. At times he carries club or staff. One account makes him strangle the Minotaur. Afterwards, he leaves by night with Ariadne and the tribute group, and the same night he reaches Dia, where he deserts Ariadne. She is then united with Dionysos. Dia was said to be Naxos, but seems rather a little island near Crete, in front of the Gulf of Amnisos, though an islet near Naxos has also been suggested. The whole episode of desertion is obscure and full of variations. In the Odyssey, Odysseus in the underworld saw Phaidra and Prokris and lovely Ariadne, daughter of baneful-minded Minos, whom once Theseus wished to lead from Crete to the Hill of holy Athens; but he never mated with her, since before that happened Artemis killed her in sea-girt Dia because of the testimonies of Dionysos.’ Here Theseus had every intention of taking her to Athens, but death separated them. In Apollodoros, Dionysos sees her on Dia, falls in love, and carries her off to Lemnos; there he mates with her and she bears him four sons. Theseus is forced to sail alone from Dia; in his grief he forgets to change his dark sails to white as he promised to do if successful in Crete; his father in dismay throws himself into the sea. Again Theseus had had no intention of leaving the girl.
A third version is given under the name of the historian Pherekydes, which is supported by scholiasts and Eustathios. ‘Setting out in deep night, Theseus disembarks at the isle of Dia and sleeps ashore. Athena appears and orders him to go off to Athens, leaving Ariadne. He at once obeys. As Ariadne laments, Aphrodite appears and consoles her; she will become Dionysos’ wife and be glorious. The god in turn arrives, mates with her, and offers the gold crown which later the gods put among the stars to please him. But, it’s said, she is killed by Artemis for losing her virginity.’ It is hard to see why Artemis should be wrathful unless Ariadne were one of her nymphs: as in one account Britomartis seems to be, at least she is described as a nymph in love with solitude and chastity. But perhaps the last sentence is an intrusion, meant to harmonize Pherekydes and Homer. (We may note a parallelism between the part played by the isle Kranae-Helena in Helen’s story, and that of Dia in Ariadne’s — though on Dia the mating goes wrong, being immediately followed by disaster, while retribution is long in catching up with Helen.)[350]
Proklos, in his summary of the Cypria, mentioned Theseus and Ariadne among the unhappy lovers whose story is recounted by Nestor to console Menelaos after the loss of Helen. The Pherekydes version, the sources say, can be found in the neoteroi, the more recent or younger poets, a term they use for the cyclic poets. There are many more variant details. Dionysos appears to Theseus in his sleep and threatens him if he does not leave Ariadne; Theseus wakes in fear and hurries off while the girl is still asleep. Dionysos takes her to Mt Drios on Naxos; there he disappears, and she soon after him. Dionysos arrives with his tumultuous following, wakes Ariadne, and carries her off in a marriage procession. He sends oblivion upon Theseus, who then leaves Ariadne on the rocky isle without knowing what he does. She was not left quite alone, as her nurse Korkyna was with her; the latter’s grave was shown on Naxos. Ploutarch adds more stories, which he notes are inconsistent: that she hanged herself on being deserted; that she was carried off by sailors to Naxos, where she married Oinaros, a priest of Dionysos; that Theseus left her because he fell in love with Aiglē (according to a line which was said to have been once in Hesiod’s works, but expunged by Peisistratos); that she lived long enough with Theseus to bear him two sons, Oinopion and Staphylos; the poet of Chios was one of those who took this view. Ploutarch also adds the Story that Theseus was driven by storm with Ariadne to Cypros. She was now advanced in pregnancy and felt ill through the rolling of the ship; so he put her ashore, himself going back to the ship to lend a hand in managing it. Then a violent wind drove the ship out again to sea. The women of Cypros did their best to help and console Ariadne; they even forged letters from Theseus; and they tended her in childbirth. But she died before her delivery and was honourably buried. Soon after that Theseus returned, was much afflicted at his loss, and, on sailing away, left a sum of money for sacrifices to be offered to Ariadne; he also ordered two little images, one silver and one bronze, to be made and dedicated to her. And so in Cypros, on the second of the month Gorpiaios, which is sacred to Ariadne, they have a ritual in which a youth lies down and with voice and gesture imitates a woman in travail; and the Amathousians call the grove with her tomb the grove of Aphrodite Ariadne.
This account is attributed to Paion of Amathous, who seems certainly later than Alexander the Great; but even if much of the story is late, it must have been invented to account for rituals about which there was no clear explanation. Ploutarch goes on to say that some of the Naxians declare there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes. One Ariadne was married to Dionysos on Naxos, where she bore two sons. The other was of a later period; she was carried off by Theseus, who deserted her; she then retired to Naxos with her nurse.[351]
Many efforts have been made to explain some of the discrepancies. The Odyssey passage has been interpreted as meaning that Ariadne was
already beloved by Dionysos, who accused her to Artemis of infidelity. Ancient critics suggested that Theseus and Ariadne had caused all the trouble by mating in a consecrated place, a sacred wood or the enclosure of Dionysos; or that Ariadne had broken a vow of virginity.[352] But however we juggle with the details, it is clear that the myth never had any clearcut lines, apart from the labyrinth episode. Ariadne belonged to both Theseus and Dionysos; and nobody could quite reconcile her two roles.
What we may call the Pherekydes version is strongly represented in the vase paintings. On a vase by the Syleus-painter, Athena orders Theseus away while Dionysos carries Ariadne off. On a Syracusan krater, Athena, with Poseidon, puts a wreath on Theseus’ head while Dionysos arrives to take over Ariadne. On a Tarentine vase Theseus retires to the ship, sword in hand as if to protect himself, while Dionysos touches the sleeping Ariadne’s breast. Once we see Athena and Dionysos appear in Dia and jointly move Theseus to depart. Vases also depict Theseus carrying off Koronē, or Theseus and Peirithoos carrying off the Amazon Antiopē — Theseus being the one that has her in his arms.[353]
One other part of the legend that concerns us is the tradition of Theseus landing on Delos with his lads and girls. There he danced with them the Crane Dance, imitating the windings of the labyrinth. He sacrificed to Apollo and set up a statue to Aphrodite which Ariadne had brought with her and given to him — a Cretan statue. The goddess was thenceforth venerated on Delos as Hagne Aphrodite: a detail that reveals again the close relation of Aphrodite to the whole venture and especially to Ariadne. In a vase painting we see at the festival of rejoicings over the deliverance, not the statue, but Ariadne herself with her nurse. Theseus led the dance and played on the lyre. On his return the Athenians in commemoration of the safety of their sons and daughters instituted the worship of the divine pair Ariadne and Dionysos at Phaleron on the coast — an act that makes no sense if Theseus had deserted Ariadne or she had left him for Dionysos. The god here appears as her co-helper in the deliverance. As we saw, Theseus’ father killed himself as a result of his negligence, and Theseus became king. The ordeal was ended in triumph; the death of the father has the same significance as the ignorant killing by Oidipous of his father, which leads on to his gaining the kingdom of Thebes.[354]
