Theseus and the Minotaur

The teaching

Taught from Plutarch's Life of Theseus, with Bacchylides, Catullus and Ovid.

The sword under the rock

Aegeus, king of Athens, has no son, and the oracle at Delphi tells him not to loose the wineskin's foot until he is home. At Troezen he lies with Aethra, the king's daughter, and before he leaves he hides his sword and sandals under a great rock, telling her that if she bears a son who can lift it, she is to send him to Athens with them in secret, for Aegeus fears the fifty sons of his brother Pallas. The boy is Theseus, and some said his true father was Poseidon. When he is grown he lifts the rock with ease, takes the tokens and chooses to go by land, along the road over the Isthmus that robbers have made deadly, because he burns to equal the deeds of his kinsman Heracles.

The road to Athens

On the road he deals with each robber as the robber dealt with others. He kills the club man Periphetes at Epidaurus and keeps his club; Sinis, who tore travellers apart between two bent pines, he kills the same way; he kills the wild sow of Crommyon, and throws Sciron, who made travellers wash his feet and kicked them over the cliff into the sea, down his own cliff; he wrestles Cercyon to death at Eleusis; and he fits Procrustes to his own bed, the bed to which that host stretched or cut his guests until they fitted. At Athens his father's wife Medea knows who he is before Aegeus does, and persuades the old king to give the stranger a cup of poison at a feast. But Theseus draws his sword as if to carve the meat, his father knows it, dashes the cup away and owns his son.

The tribute

Then the ship comes for the tribute. Androgeos, son of King Minos of Crete, was killed in Attica, and Minos made war on Athens until the gods, sending plague and famine, bade the city give him what he asked: every ninth year seven young men and seven girls, sent to Crete to be shut in the Labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, or to wander there until they died. Theseus offers himself, or, as some tell it, is chosen by lot. His father gives the steersman a white sail and bids him raise it on the way home if Theseus lives; the ship goes out under a black one, as on a voyage to death.

The dive

Bacchylides sings the voyage. On the ship Minos lays his hand on the cheek of one of the Athenian girls, Eriboea, and Theseus rebukes him: he too has a god for his father. Minos prays to Zeus, who answers with lightning, then throws his gold ring into the sea and dares Theseus to fetch it from his father's house. Theseus leaps, and dolphins carry him down to the hall of Poseidon, where the daughters of Nereus dance in a light like fire, and the queen Amphitrite clothes him in a purple robe and sets on his hair a wreath dark with roses, her own wedding gift from Aphrodite. He rises beside the ship unwetted, with the gifts of the sea, to the dismay of Minos, and the young Athenians raise a song of joy.

The thread

In Crete, Ariadne, daughter of Minos, falls in love with him, and by the counsel of Daedalus gives him a ball of thread. He fastens it at the door of the Labyrinth and unwinds it as he goes in, through the windings Daedalus built, which Ovid likens to the river Maeander turning back on itself, so that Daedalus himself could scarcely find the way out. At the heart of it he kills the Minotaur, with his sword or, as some say, with his fists, follows the thread back to the door, and sails away with Ariadne and the young Athenians. On Delos, Plutarch says, he and the young people danced a dance that imitates the turns and returns of the Labyrinth, still danced there in his day and called the Crane.

Ariadne on the shore

On the island of Naxos, or Dia, he leaves her, and here the tellings part. Catullus pictures her waking on the empty shore to see his sails far out, her robe slipping from her as she stands, and lets her curse him: may he bring on himself and his house, with the same forgetful mind, the grief he has brought on her; and Jupiter nods assent. Catullus and Ovid both bring Bacchus to her with his rout, burning with love, and Ovid has him set her crown among the stars, where it shines still between the Kneeler and the Serpent Holder. Plutarch gathers the darker versions and the plainer: that she hanged herself when she was left; that she stayed on Naxos and married a priest of Dionysus; that Theseus left her for love of another woman; or that a storm drove his ship from Cyprus while she lay ill ashore, and she died there in childbirth. Monteverdi set her lament to music in 1608, and its first cry, Lasciatemi morire, let me die, is sung still.

The black sail

Coming home, in his joy, or his grief for Ariadne, or under her curse, Theseus forgets to change the sail. Old Aegeus, watching from the heights, sees it black, believes his son dead and throws himself down from the rock; later tellers say into the sea, which bears his name. Plutarch tells the rites Athens kept for that day: at the feast of the return the herald carries his wreath on his staff and not on his head, and the people's cries mix joy with grief. The ship of thirty oars the Athenians kept for centuries, putting in new timber as the old planks rotted, until the philosophers used it to argue whether a thing renewed in all its parts remains the same thing.

What the tellers read in it

Plutarch set out to make the fable submit to reason and take on the look of history, and his Theseus is the king who gathered the scattered villages of Attica into one city and gave it a common festival, the founder whose bones Athens brought home from Scyros and honoured. Medieval Christians made the slayer in the Labyrinth a figure of Christ, who goes down into the house of death, overcomes the beast at its centre and leads the captives out, and they laid the winding path in the floors of their churches; that reading and the walking of the path are taught under Sacred places, in The labyrinth of Chartres. Catullus draws the old tale's own hard lesson from the sail: the same forgetfulness that left Ariadne alone on the shore left Aegeus to die.