AEGEUS’s first wife was Melite, daughter of Hoples; and his second, Chalcioppe, daughter of Rhexenor; but neither bore him any children. Ascribing this, and the misfortunes of his sisters Procne and Philomela, to Aphrodite’s anger, he introduced her worship into Athens, and then went to consult the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle warned him not to untie the mouth of his bulging wine-skin until he reached the highest point of Athens, lest he die one day of grief, a response which Aegeus could not interpret.
b. On his way home he called at Corinth; and here Medea made him swear a solemn oath that he would shelter her from all enemies if she ever sought refuge at Athens, and undertook in return to procure him a son by magic. Next, he visited Troezen, where his old comrades Pittheus and Troezen, sons of Pelops, had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Aetius. Aetius was the successor of his father Anthas, son of Poseidon and Alcyone who, having founded the cities Anthaea and Hyperea, had lately sailed off to found Halicarnass in Caria. But Aetius seems to have enjoyed little power, because Pittheus, after Troezen’s death, united Anthaea and Hyperea into a single city, which he dedicated jointly to Athene and Poseidon, calling Troezen.
d. Now, while Pittheus was still living at Pisa, Bellerophon asked to marry his daughter Aethra, but had been sent away to Caria in disgrace before the marriage could be celebrated; though still attracted to Bellerophon, she had little hope of his return. Pittheus, therefore, grieving at her enforced virginity, and influenced by the spell which Medea was casting on all of them from afar, made Aegeus drunk and sent him to bed with Aethra. Later in the same night, Poseidon also enjoyed her. For, in obedience to a dream sent by Athene, she left the drunken Aegeus, and waded across to the island of Sphaeria, which lies close to the mainland of Troezen, carrying libations to pour at the tomb of Sphaerus, Pelops’s charioteer. There, with Athene’s guidance, Poseidon overpowered her, and Aethra subsequently changed the name of the island from Sphaeria to Hiera, and founded on temple of Apaturian Athene, establishing a rule that girls should henceforth dedicate her girdle to the goddess before marriage. Poseidon, however, generously conceded to Aegeus the parentage of any child born to Aethra in the due time.
e. Aegeus, when he awoke and found himself in Aethra’s bed, told her that if a son were born to them he must not be exposed or sent away, but secretly reared in Troezen. Then he sailed back celebrate the All-Athenian Festival, after hiding his sword and sandals under a hollow rock, known as Altar of Strong Zeus, that stood on the road from Troezen to Hermium. If, when the boy is born, he could move this rock and recover the tokens, he was to be sent with them to Athens. Meanwhile, Aethra must keep silence, lest Aegeus nephews, the fifty children of Pallas, plotted against her life. The sword was an heirloom from Cecrops.
g. One day Heracles, dining at Troezen with Pittheus, removed his lion-skin and threw it over a stool. When the palace children came in, they screamed and fled, all except seven-year- old Theseus, who ran to take axe from the woodpile, and returned boldly, prepared to attack a real lion.
h. At the age of sixteen years he visited Delphi, and offered his first shaven hair-clippings to Apollo. He shaved, however, only the fore of his head, like the Arabians and Mysians, or like the war-like Euboeans, who thereby deny their enemies any advantage in combat. This kind of tonsure, and the precinct where he performed the ceremony, are both still called Thesean. He was now an intelligent and prudent youth; and Aethra, leading him to the rock underneath which Aegeus had hidden the sword and sandals, told story of his birth. He had no difficulty in moving the rock, called the ‘Rock of Theseus’, and recovered the tokens. Yet, at Pittheus’s warnings and his mother’s entreaties, he would not visit Athens by the safe sea route, but insisted on travelling over by foot, impelled by a desire to emulate the feats of his cousin-german Heracles, whom he greatly admired.
***
1. Pittheus is a masculine form of Pitthea. The names of the towns which he united to form Troezen suggests a matriarchal calendar-triad, consisting of Anthea (‘flowery’), the Goddess of Spring, Hyperea (‘being overhead’), the Goddess of Summer, when the sun is its zenith; and Pitthea (‘pine-goddess’), worshipped in autumn when Attis-Adonis was sacrificed on his pine. They may be identified with the Triple-goddess Themis, to whom Pittheus raised an altar, since the name Troezen is apparently a worn-down form of trion hezomenon- ‘[the city] of the three sitters’, which refers to the three white thrones which served ‘Pittheus and two others’ as seats of justice.
3. There seem, however, to have been at least three mythological characters called Theseus: one from Troezen, one from Marathon in Attica, and the third from Lapith territory. These were not unified into a single character until the sixth century BC, when (as Professor George Thomson suggests) the Butads, a Lapith clan who had become leading aristocrats at Athens and even usurped the native Pelasgian priesthood of Erechtheus, put forward the Athenian Theseus as a rival to Dorian Heracles. Again, Pittheus was clearly both an Elean and Troezenian title-also borne by the eponymous hero of an Attic deme belonging to the Cecropian tribe.
4. Aethra’s visit to Sphaeria suggests that the ancient custom of sacral prostitution by unmarried girls survived in Athene’s temple for some time after the patriarchal system had been introduced. It can hardly have been brought from Crete, since Troezen is not a Mycenaean site; but was perhaps a Canaanite importation, as at Corinth.
5. Sandals and sword are ancient symbols of royalty; the drawing of a sword from a rock seems to have formed part of the Bronze Age coronation ritual. Odin, Galahad, and Arthur were all in turn required to perform a similar feat; and an immense sword, lion-hilted and plunged into a rock, figures in the sacred marriage scene carved at Hattasus. Since Aegeus’s rock is called both the Altar of Strong Zeus and the Rock of Theseus, it may be assumed that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Theseus’ were alternative titles of the sacred king who was crowned upon it; but the goddess armed him. The ‘Apollo’ to whom Theseus dedicated his hair will have been Karu (‘son of the goddess Car’), otherwise known as Car, or Q’re, or Carys, the solar king whose locks were annually shorn before his death, like those of Tyrian Samson and Megarean Nisus. At a feast called the Comyria (‘hair trimming’), young men sacrificed their forelocks in yearly mourning for him, and were afterwards known as Curetes. This custom, probably of Libyan origin (Herodotus), had spread to Asia Minor and Greece; an injunction against it occurs in Leviticus. But, by Plutarch’s time, Apollo was worshipped as the immortal Sun-god and, in proof of this, kept his own hair rigorously un-shorn.
6. Aetius’s division of Troezenia between Troezen, Pittheus, and himself, recalls the arrangement made by Proetus with Melampus and Bias. The Pittheus who taught rhetoric and whose treatise survived until Classical times must have been a late historical character.
Comments
Post a Comment