Theseus
THEE-syoos
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe Athenian hero: the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, the thread, and the sail he forgot to change, which killed his father.
Thucydides credits him with something less dramatic and more consequential, dissolving the separate councils of Attica and bringing them into one city, which is how Athens became a single state.
Plutarch pairs him with Romulus as founders, and admits at the outset that in writing about him he is passing beyond the reach of evidence into what poets and storytellers have made.
Sources
- Thuc. 2.15
- Plut. Thes. 1
- Plut. Thes. 15-19
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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