Theseus

mythological figure

Theseus is a hero of Greek mythology and the legendary king of Athens, not a figure for whom a secure historical biography can be reconstructed. In the developed Athenian tradition he is the son of Aegeus—or, in another strand, Poseidon—and Aethra. His best-known adventure is the journey to Crete, where he enters the Labyrinth and kills the Minotaur with Ariadne’s assistance before returning to Athens.

Athenian tradition also made Theseus a political founder who united the communities of Attica under Athens, while other myths connect him with the Amazons, the Centaurs, Heracles and the abduction of Helen. Tragedy often presents a more complicated ruler whose interventions have destructive consequences as well as heroic ones. Plutarch later organised these traditions into a rationalising ‘Life’, but he himself recognised that he was working at the boundary between myth and history.

Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Athens is the most directly biographical linked work, opening its sequence of Athenian lives with Theseus. Euripides’ linked collections use him in plays such as The Suppliant Women, while Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen adapt the Athenian ruler for later drama. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey belong to the wider heroic world rather than providing a continuous Theseus biography. Euripides’ Electra and Other Plays includes The Suppliant Women, in which Theseus must decide whether Athens should intervene to recover the bodies of the Argive dead from Thebes and defend the obligations owed to the fallen. In Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, Hippolytus makes Theseus the father whose belief in Phaedra’s accusation leads him to invoke a fatal curse against his innocent son.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Theseus (1 series)

Penguin Classics: Ancient World in Order

by various authors 32 books 4.6(13,212)

Penguin Classics: Ancient World brings together foundational works of literature, history, philosophy, drama and poetry from the earliest civilisations through classical Greece and Rome. The wider Penguin Classics series began in 1946 with E. V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, reflecting its original aim of making important texts…