The Bull from the Sea (34 page)

“In clear weather,” he said, “one sees Euboia. Yes, that point of light must be a watch-fire there. But you are used to an eagle’s perch; I think your rock is higher?”

“No,” I answered. “Yours has a hill below it, and mine a plain. This stands higher by far. But if you take cliff for cliff, just the sheer drop, I daresay there is not much in it.”

“If my house speaks of home to you,” he said, “so use it, and I am content.”

I lay down, being tired, and sent off my servants. I was thinking, before I fell asleep, of the flashing light-footed boy, awaiting tomorrow. It would be good to spare him that. Let him keep this Theseus who speaks for the god within him. Why change a god for a lame old man with a twisted mouth? I could warn him of what he is; but it would not alter him. Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them.

So I was thinking, when weariness closed my eyes. I slept; and I dreamed of Marathon.

It seemed I was wakened by a great din of battle. I leaped from my naked bed; I was in old Hekaline’s cottage, young again, with my arms beside me. I snatched them and ran outside. The sun shone brightly; beached along the strand was a great fleet of warships, full of outlandish warriors scrambling ashore. They were too many for pirates; it was war, and a great one; for all the men of Athens were there, drawn up to defend their fields. As one finds in dreams, there was something quaint about them; they had helms of bronze, with curving crests like the hoopoe’s, and little round shields painted with beasts and birds. But I knew them for my people; and few enough they looked, facing that horde, as we were when the Scythians came. I thought of the City, the women and children waiting; and I forgot I had ever suffered wrong from Athens. Once more I was the King.

It was all foot-fighting; I don’t know where the chariots were. Just then some chief started the paean, and they gave the war-yell, charging at a run. I thought, “They know I am with them! Marathon always brought me luck, and I am the luck of Marathon.” My feet were light as I raced up through the press into the vanguard; and when I reached the line of the barbarians, in my hands was the sacred ax of Crete, that I used to kill the Minotaur. I swung it about my head; the outlanders gave backward; then the men of Athens knew me, and started to cry my name. The enemy were on the run for their ships, clambering and falling and drowning; it was victory, clear and sure. We gave a great yell of triumph; and my own noise woke me. I was lying with the moon upon my face, by the window that looked down at the crags of Skyros. Sound travels far on a quiet night; even so high, I heard the sound of the sea.

The dream is gone; why has it left no grief of loss behind it? Hope comes in these waves, like water filling a dried-up pool. Here from the window, I see the sea smooth as a mirror spread with moonlight; yet the sound grows. Is it true, then, as Oedipus said to me at Kolonos, that the power returns? The gods sent me as a guide to him; have they sent Lykomedes now to me? If my house speaks of home to you, so use it.”

Yes; it is rising. Not high and exultant, as it was upon the Pnyx; but steady, sure and strong. Bitterness scours away in it. I will not offer my death to strangers, like Oedipus of Thebes. Let Father Poseidon have it, to keep against my people’s need. There will be a time, as my dream foretold. In the dream they had no king with them; maybe he would not make the offering. They knew me, and cried my name. Some harper had brought it down to them. While the bard sings and the child remembers, I shall not perish from off the Rock.

This balcony clings to the living cliff. I see a walk beyond it, threading the crag. That will do well. If I go from here, it might be said that Lykomedes murdered me. It would be discourteous to shame my host. But there is only Akamas left to ask my blood-price; and he, though he is half Cretan, knows well enough how the Erechthids die.

Surely goats made this track. That boy, Achilles, might scramble here for a dare. No place, this, for a dragging foot; but all the better. It will seem like mischance, except to those who know.

The tide comes in. A swelling sea, calm, strong and shining. To swim under the moon, onward and onward, plunging with the dolphins, singing … To leap with the wind in my hair …

T
HE LEGEND OF THESEUS,
as it came down to the Greeks of the classical period, is briefly summarized following this Note. It may be in place here, however, to explain how I interpreted the story of his youth up to his return from Crete in an earlier book,
The King Must Die.

It is assumed there that two forms of divine kingship coexisted in Mycenaean Greece. The Pelasgians, or Shore Folk, and the Minoans worshipped the Earth Mother, whose king consort was an inferior, expendable figure, sacrificed after each cycle of the crops so that his youth and potency could be forever renewed. Though in Crete a Greek conquest had brought hereditary kingship, parts of the older cult remained. Ariadne was its High Priestess by right of birth.

But Theseus’ forebears, patriarchal invaders from the north, saw their kings as direct intermediaries between the people and the Sky Gods on whose life-giving rain the crops depended. On the King, therefore, devolved the noble responsibility of offering his own life as supreme sacrifice when, in times of great crisis, the auguries demanded it. Theseus, whose whole life story implies a tension and conflict between these two principles, is supposed to have been reared in Troizen with a sense of his royal destiny, to have imposed the Olympian cult at Eleusis after a ritual king-killing, and presented himself to his father in Athens after putting down the bandits of the Isthmus in a victorious military operation. Having been recognized as King Aigeus’ heir, he offered himself as a voluntary sacrifice when the Cretan tribute of youths and girls fell due.

The doom of these young people, as most scholars agree, must have been to take part in the dangerous sport of bull-leaping so often depicted in Minoan art; and I represented the Minotaur as the human son of Queen Pasiphaë’s adultery, plotting to destroy the dying King Minos and usurp the throne. Theseus, by his skill and leadership in the bull-dance, kept his team of Athenians alive till in the confusion following one of the great Cretan earthquakes (of whose approach he had an inherited premonition) he led the oppressed native serfs and the captive bull-dancers in a successful revolt. Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him for his prowess in the ring and helped in his conspiracy, sailed with him for Athens. But when the ship put in at Naxos, he found to his horror that, reverting to the most savage rites of the ancient religion, she joined the maenads in the yearly Dionysiac orgy, and helped them tear their young King to pieces, like Agave in the
Bacchae
of Euripides. Abandoning her in her exhausted sleep, he went home alone. It is here that
The Bull from the Sea
takes up the story.

The Amazons of classical legend seem to be a product of two fused traditions. I see no need to doubt, though I have not adopted it, Herodotos’ account of a tribe whose women, after the slaughter of all their men, preferred to form their own fighting community rather than endure the miseries of an alien bondage, so movingly described by Homer’s Hector, and so little changed even in historic times. I have preferred, however, partly because it accounts so much better for the role of the Amazons in the great invasion, to make them warrior priestesses of Artemis, such as those who, Pausanias said, used to guard her sanctuary at Ephesos. Many races and religions show vestiges of such corps, sometimes surviving as the bodyguards of sacred kings. Megathenes found them in the Aryan kingdoms of North India in 300 B.C., as did Sir Richard Burton two thousand years later, though then reduced to a purely decorative function.

The Amazons of Pontos belonged traditionally to the race of the White Scythians, hence their silver hair; the single plait occurs in Anatolian figurines of girls or goddesses across several millennia. The Ephesian Amazons are said to have danced with cymbals and sistra; but the weapon-dance is derived from one that I myself have witnessed, though done by men and boys-the Moslem “Khalifa.” It is a strange, impressive, and undoubtedly true performance; the sharp points and edges are offered to the watchers to test before, at the climax of the music, the flesh is pierced and does not bleed.

Though the later legend makes Theseus marry Phaedra only after Hippolyta’s death in battle, or after a faithless rejection which caused her to declare war in revenge (but Plutarch rejects this version as corrupt), marriage to the Cretan princess was a dynastic necessity so obvious that it, or at least a betrothal, would have had to take place soon after his conquest of the island. The legend gives her more than one child by him, but says little of Akamas. After a time of refuge in Euboia, where he was reared as a private gentleman, he went, it seems still with the same status, to the Trojan War. There he proved brave and trustworthy enough to be picked for the forlorn hope in the Wooden Horse; yet nothing is said of any quarrel with Menestheus, who led the Athenians as King. Some say Menestheus was killed, others that he died, others again that he was deposed by the Athenians. In any case, Akamas succeeded to the throne, in what circumstances is not related.

His role in revealing the guilt of Phaedra is my own device. Theseus learned the truth; each teller of the tale has supplied a different mouthpiece, human or divine. The constant elements are the attempted seduction, the young man’s silence under the woman’s slander, Theseus’ invocation of Poseidon, and the wave-borne Sea Bull. Since Theseus’ career was not that of a stupid man, it must have needed more than a sudden wild accusation to persuade him that his son had so belied his nature. Euripides makes Phaedra hang herself, leaving a written charge against Hippolytos; a gesture persuasive enough, but rather large for so mean a purpose. I have borrowed on purpose the young man’s dying words; it seems to me a possibility well worth considering, that Socrates, who faced his death with such unswerving constancy, made his offering in thanks for a revealing dream.

The dead youth vanishes in mystery. Some say the Troizenians knew his tomb, but would not show it to strangers; some that Artemis carried him to Epidauros, where Asklepios raised him from the dead, but was struck down by Zeus for this presumption. The youth was then conveyed by the goddess to Italy, where he haunts the sacred wood of Virbius disguised as an ancient man. Lest he should be reminded of his former sufferings (or perhaps of his father’s unpitying god) no horse is allowed within the grove.

The remarkably widespread forays of Theseus in pursuit of various women have often been remarked on, and explained away in religious terms as the suppression of goddesses’ shrines. But it seems to me that the ancient and aristocratic pursuit of piracy accounts for all these episodes with much less trouble.

In 490 B.C. the Persians landed at Marathon, and were thrown back by the Athenians against overwhelming odds. Afterwards the victors reported that Theseus had appeared on the field in arms to lead them, like the fighting angels of Mons. This gave great impetus to his hero-cult in Athens; and in 475 his alleged bones were brought back by Kimon from Skyros, after a campaign for which the story of Lykomedes’ guest-murder must have made good propaganda. Legend says nothing of any such belief by Theseus’ own heirs; and an alternative version, in which Theseus fell from the cliff by a slip of the foot, continued to survive. The likeness of his death to his father’s is very striking. His epitaph may best be left to Plutarch. “His tomb is a sanctuary and refuge for fleeing slaves, and all men of low estate who fear the mighty; in memory that Theseus while he lived defended the oppressed, and heard the suppliant’s prayer with kindness.”

K
ING AIGEUS OF ATHENS,
dogged by misfortune and childless through the enmity of Aphrodite, established her worship in Athens and went to consult the Delphic Oracle. It enjoined him not to untie his wineskin till he reached home again, or he would die one day of grief. On his way back through Troizen he told his story to King Pittheus, who, guessing that some notable birth was portended, led Aigeus while drunk to the bed of his daughter Aithra. Later in the same night, she was commanded in a dream to wade over to the island shrine of Athene, where Poseidon also lay with her. When Aigeus awoke he left his sword and sandals under an altar of Zeus, telling Aithra, if a son was born, to send him to Athens as soon as he could lift the stone. This feat Theseus achieved when only sixteen; he was then already a youth of heroic size and strength, skilled with the lyre, and the inventor of scientific wrestling.

Choosing to travel to Athens by the Isthmus Road, in order to prove himself against its dangers, he overthrew in single combat all the monsters and tyrants who made its travellers their prey. In Megara he killed the giant sow Phaia, and in Eleusis slew King Kerkyon, who slaughtered wayfarers by forcing them to wrestle to the death.

When he reached Athens, the witch Medea, his father’s mistress, divined his parentage, and to secure her own son’s succession persuaded Aigeus that this formidable youth was a threat to his throne. Aigeus prepared a poisoned cup to give him at a public feast; but Theseus displayed the sword in the nick of time. Aigeus dashed the cup from his lips and joyfully embraced him; the witch escaped in her chariot drawn by winged dragons.

Aigeus adopted Theseus as his heir amid public rejoicing; Pallas, the former heir, and his fifty sons were killed by the young prince or driven into exile. Theseus won further honor by taming a wild bull which was ravaging the Marathon plain. Soon after, however, the City was plunged in mourning by the arrival of the Cretan tribute-vessel, with a demand for the boys and girls regularly sent off to be devoured by the Minotaur.

King Minos of Crete had been provided by Poseidon, in answer to a vow, with a magnificent bull for sacrifice, but had kept it for himself. As a punishment, Aphrodite visited his queen, Pasiphaë, with a monstrous passion for it, which she consummated within a hollow cow made for her by Daidalos the master-craftsman. Their offspring was the Minotaur, a being with a man’s body and a bull’s head, who fed on human flesh. To conceal his shame, Minos had an impenetrable Labyrinth made by Daidalos, where he withdrew from the world, and, in the heart of the maze, concealed the Minotaur, introducing a supply of human victims into his den.