of this confrontation would have it that the story was reverse-engineered to fit the myth of Theseus’ youthful Labours, and that it actually had its origins in a later and more routine political takeover. This reading has it that Cercyon was a real king and that Theseus wrested, rather than wrestled, his realm – Eleusis – from him in later days, when Theseus was by that time a king himself. fn5 We even know the day of Theseus’s arrival in Athens. It was, according to Plutarch, the eighth day of the month of Hecatombaion, somewhere around July and August in our calendar. It was the month in the Attic calendar when each year a hundred cattle were ritually sacrificed to the gods. fn6 According to Plutarch and Pausanias, they were the sons of PHYTALUS (‘butterfly’, perhaps?) who had once shown great kindness to Demeter. In recompense, the goddess granted his descendants the power to expiate those who broke the laws of hospitality. fn7 Known as the Palliantidae. fn8 See the story of Heracles (here). But don’t think too hard about timelines and the relative ages of Theseus and Heracles or we’ll all go mad. fn9 Here again Theseus invented an art, that of bull-leaping. It may sound comical, but plenty of archaeological evidence has been uncovered showing this mixture of sport and entertainment. It can be considered a forerunner of modern bullfighting. Both techniques rely on finesse and timing and aim to tire the bull out rather than engage with it fairly. So different from dear, honest Heracles. fn10 The same Plain of Marathon saw the soldiers of Athens win their startling victory against the Medes and Persians in 490 BC. Pheidippides was said to have run the 25 or so miles from Marathon to Athens to break the news of the victory, shouting the word ‘nenikekamen!’ – ‘we won!’ – before expiring the ground of exhaustion at having run the first ‘marathon’. fn11 It sprang from where Cerberus’s drool hit the ground when Heracles took him to the Upper World. fn12 Just as Perseus’s son Perses gave us Persia and the Persians, so Medus went on to give us the Medes. Medes and Persians in turn, went on to attempt to get their revenge on Theseus’s city of Athens many, many generations later when they launched an invasion under Darius the Great and then Xerxes. One man’s Mede, as Dorothy Parker observed, is another man’s Persian. As for Medea, little more of her is heard, which is a pity. There was a tradition that had her in the Meadows of Asphodel marrying Achilles in the afterlife. fn13 The zoological name for the genus is still perdix, the Latin for partridge. fn14 See Mythos, Vol. I. fn15 That bull ascended to the heavens as the constellation Taurus. fn16 This was an especially cutting remark for Aegeus’s name means ‘goatlike’. fn17 A spring month. fn18 The Greek poet Bacchylides tells in one of his lyrics, his ‘dithyrambs’, that when the ship arrived Minos tried it on with one of the Athenian girls, Eriboia, and that Theseus defended her. Minos claimed that as a son of Zeus (in this version he is the first Minos, issue of Europa and Zeus) he had the right. Theseus countered that he was a son of Poseidon. Minos tested him by throwing a golden ring into the sea and telling Theseus to fetch it back. Theseus dived in and was taken by a dolphin to Poseidon’s palace where Nereids gave him the ring and all kinds of gifts besides. He then emerged from the sea and presented the ring and other treasures to an astonished Minos. All this is charming but it seems odd that Minos would then imprison Theseus with the others as if nothing had happened. He would surely be wary that Theseus might be the first Athenian to prove himself a match for the beast and the labyrinth itself. fn19 The story of Daedalus and Icarus has long been a favourite with artists. The combined brilliance of Pieter Breugel the Elder and W. H. Auden has given us the latter’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, one of his finest. Sculptures and paintings on the subject abound. My favourite use of the myth is in the relief representation of the falling Icarus on the wall outside the bankruptcy court of Amsterdam. Rembrandt might well have looked up at it during the proceedings against him and been reminded of the perils of soaring ambition. So far as I know he never painted an Icarus picture himself but scores, hundreds, of artists and sculptors have. fn20 He federated Megara (a region, not to be confused with Heracles’ first wife), for example, and installed Cercyon’s son Hippothoon on the throne of Eleusis, which extended the reach of Athens as far as Corinth. fn21 Usually pronounced ‘Pirry-tho-us’ with an unvoiced ‘th’, as in ‘thistle’ – think, ‘Pirry-throw-us’ without the R. fn22 The Lapiths were credited with inventing the bit for greater control of the horse’s mouth. fn23 Issue, some say, of the Marathonian Bull who fathered them before Theseus tamed him and took him to Athens to be sacrificed. The Marathonian Bull that had been the Cretan Bull that fathered the Minotaur, of course. The baleful influence of that animal seems to have no end. fn24 They were children of Ixion and Nephele, the cloud goddess in the shape of Hera that was created by Zeus to prove Ixion’s wickedness. The same Nephele who went on to send down the Golden Ram to rescue Phrixus. fn25 Her name means ‘tamer of horses’. Horses gallop all the way through the story of Pirithous. fn26 Similar to its effect on the centaurs including, fatefully, Nessus, who drank wine in Pholus’s cave during Heracles’ Fourth Labour. fn27 ‘War’ rather than ‘battle’ really, but battle sounds better in English somehow. The accidental rhyme in ‘War of the Centaurs’ or ‘Centaur War’ seems inelegant. fn28 See the story of Heracles (here). fn29 In some versions (including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Theseus is married to Hippolyta herself. In these tellings Theseus accompanies Heracles on the Ninth Labour, and instead of Heracles killing Hippolyta, he gives her to Theseus. fn30 For more on the Amazonian lifestyle see Heracles’ Ninth Labour (here). fn31 Sited just below the heights of the Acropolis, the Areopagus was the meeting place of the Athenian Council of Elders, and later the site of the court where serious crimes were tried. John Milton invoked it in his great polemic against censorship, the Areopagitica. fn32 The German classicist Bruno Snell puts it very well: ‘For the Greeks, the Titanomachy and the battle against the giants remained symbols of the victory which their own world had won over a strange universe; along with the battles against the Amazons and Centaurs they continue to signalize the Greek conquest of everything barbarous, of all monstrosity and grossness.’ fn33 See the first volume of Mythos (page 43). fn34 See the story of Heracles (here). fn35 For example, the Parthenon in Athens prominently featured sculptures depicting the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy and the Centauromachy. Examples of the latter can still be seen to this day, as can the Centauromachy that once adorned another of the most important buildings of classical Greece, the temple of Zeus at Olympia. fn36 This story is better told another time … fn37 See Heracles’ Twelfth Labour (here). fn38 Think Mick Jagger. fn39 The twins not only returned Helen to Sparta, but they forcibly took Theseus’s mother Aethra along with her to act as her nurse and companion. This position she held into extreme old age. Her grandsons Acamas and Demophon would finally rescue her during the fall of Troy. But that too is a story for another time. fn40 The versions by Euripides in Hippolytus (the surviving play of two that he wrote on the story) and in Phaedra by the Roman playwright Seneca both alter this a little. She never speaks of her love, but commits suicide and leaves a note implicating Hippolytus. fn41 The Grandfather’s Axe, its blade and handle regularly replaced, presents a similar ontological conundrum in the field of study known as the Metaphysics of Identity.

ENVOI fn1 See the story of Heracles (here, here and here).

THE OFFSPRING OF ECHIDNA AND TYPHON fn1 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

THE RAGES OF HERACLES fn1 The Benoit case has resulted in a much stricter regime of testing and a zero-tolerance of drug taking in the WWE, I am told. fn2 Perhaps comic book fans will also want to draw a comparison with Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk.

AFTERWORD fn1 And dreams, ‘private myths’.

LIST OF CHARACTERS fn1 Hades spent all of his time in the underworld, so technically he is often not regarded as one of the twelve Olympians. fn2 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion. fn3 In some but not all versions of Heracles’ Eleventh Labour. fn4 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion. fn5 It was Zeus’s punishment for this appalling crime that immortalized Tantalus’s name. See the first volume of Mythos (page 263). fn6 See the first volume of Mythos (page 224).