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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Parallel Lives," Plutarch presents a profound exploration of moral character through biographical sketches of prominent Greek and Roman figures. This seminal work juxtaposes the lives of notable individuals, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, examining their virtues and vices in a narrative that intertwines biography with philosophy. Plutarch's literary style is a rich tapestry of anecdotal evidence and moral reflection, written in a way that appeals to both the intellect and the imagination. Contextually, the text emerges from a time of cultural exchange in the Greco-Roman world, highlighting the shared moral philosophies of these two civilizations while also emphasizing their distinct political legacies. Plutarch, a Greek biographer, philosopher, and historian from the first century AD, was deeply influenced by the philosophical ideals of his time, particularly Stoicism and Platonic thought. His extensive work and travel across the Roman Empire, along with his engagement with various intellectual traditions, informed his approach in "Parallel Lives." By seeking to illustrate the ethical dimensions of leadership and individual conduct, Plutarch invited readers to draw parallels between their lives and those of historical figures, aiming to cultivate moral virtues. Readers enthralled by the intersections of history, philosophy, and ethics will find "Parallel Lives" both enlightening and resonant. It serves not only as a historical account but also as a reflective guide for personal growth. Plutarch's insights continue to be relevant, making this work a timeless treasure for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of human behavior through the lens of historical figures. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Parallel Lives
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in two volumes under the familiar title Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Written in Greek during the early second century of the Roman Empire by Plutarch of Chaeronea, the Lives are paired biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, arranged to invite reflection across cultures and eras. By gathering the extant Lives in a unified set, this edition offers readers the scope and rhythm of Plutarch’s project as he conceived it: not isolated portraits, but a sustained sequence in which individual character is brought into focus through narrative, comparison, and measured moral consideration.
The purpose of assembling these two volumes is to make accessible the full range of Plutarch’s surviving biographical work in its traditional paired design. Each pair juxtaposes a Greek and a Roman life, typically followed by a comparison essay that weighs their qualities and achievements. Where transmission has preserved only one member of a pair or has otherwise interrupted the pattern, the extant text is presented without conjectural supplementation. Read together, these volumes restore the continuity of Plutarch’s method and allow readers to experience the cumulative force of his comparisons.
The primary genre represented here is biography, specifically the comparative biography that Plutarch helped to define. Within that frame, the Lives incorporate elements recognizable from historiography, moral reflection, anecdote, and character study. They are not novels, short stories, letters, or diaries, nor are they comprehensive chronicles in the modern sense. Rather, they are shaped narratives that draw on earlier sources to illuminate the conduct and disposition of public figures. The work’s hybridity—historical narrative threaded with ethical observation—accounts for both its literary vitality and its long-standing role in education and civic discourse.
Plutarch’s stated aim was to investigate character and the springs of action, more than to pursue exhaustive chronology. Accordingly, the Lives privilege episodes that reveal disposition: how leaders chose, endured, and governed; how they balanced public responsibility with private habit; and how fortune and temperament interacted. The concluding comparisons, when preserved, invite the reader to weigh virtues and faults across cultures, offices, and circumstances. The result is a moral inquiry conducted through narrative, in which examples are neither simplified into lessons nor detached from the complexities of political life.
The structure of the Parallel Lives undergirds this inquiry. Each biography stands on its own as a crafted portrait, often prefaced by a brief introduction in which Plutarch situates his subject or his approach. The subsequent pairing draws out likenesses and contrasts, culminating in a comparison essay that clarifies the moral and civic dimensions of the two lives. Some pieces survive without their intended counterpart, a condition of the textual transmission rather than of design. This edition preserves that reality while keeping the sequence intelligible and the pairwise logic evident where the materials allow.
Across the volumes, recurring themes emerge with clarity. Leadership is examined in its various forms—lawgiver, general, statesman, orator—alongside the demands of justice, moderation, courage, and prudence. Plutarch explores ambition’s promise and peril, the making and testing of reputation, the pressures of civic conflict, and the uses of power. He is attentive to education, habit, and counsel, and to the influence of custom and constitution on individual judgment. The Lives consistently return to questions of responsibility: what a public life asks of character, and how character shapes a community’s fortunes.
Plutarch’s stylistic hallmarks serve these themes. His prose is measured and attentive to rhythm; his portraits favor the telling detail over catalogues of events; and his judgments are typically balanced, acknowledging conflicting reports and the limits of certainty. He draws on a wide array of earlier historians, memoirs, and traditions, sometimes preserving fragmentary anecdotes that would otherwise be lost. The result is neither mere compilation nor rhetorical display, but a steady, humane voice that seeks to understand famous actors as persons whose choices can be weighed and whose examples can instruct without becoming formulaic.
Historically, the Lives offer a rich, if selective, window onto Greek and Roman public life. They are not modern critical history, and Plutarch sometimes includes legendary material or conflicting testimonies. Yet his care for sources, his discrimination among reports, and his sustained interest in motives make the Lives invaluable as interpretive histories of character in action. The cross-cultural design enables readers to see institutions and customs in relief, as Greek and Roman practices are set alongside one another and considered for their convergences, divergences, and mutual illuminations.
The work’s reception underscores its lasting significance. From late antiquity through the Renaissance, the Lives were central to moral and civic education, shaping ideals of statesmanship and virtue. Early modern dramatists and historians drew on Plutarch’s narratives; notably, the Lives furnished principal material for several Roman plays that remain central to the stage. Later thinkers and biographers continued to find in these portraits a model for writing about public character. The book’s influence has therefore extended beyond classical studies into literature, political thought, and the broader tradition of life writing.
Readers may approach these volumes in several profitable ways. The paired biographies reward sequential reading, allowing the comparison essays to do their work of weighing likenesses and differences. Individual lives can also be read on their own, as coherent portraits with their own internal balance of narrative and reflection. The volumes have been arranged to preserve the integrity of the pairings and to make navigation straightforward, whether one is following the full sequence or consulting particular figures of interest. Cross-references within the Lives often encourage a return to earlier themes and examples.
A word on transmission and arrangement is in order. The Parallel Lives reach us through a manuscript tradition in which some pairs and comparisons have been lost or damaged. This collection presents the extant biographies and the concluding comparisons when they survive, without reconstructing missing material. The two-volume format reflects a longstanding editorial practice designed to accommodate the full corpus while keeping the pairwise structure visible. Readers will thus find both the breadth of Plutarch’s biographical project and the texture of its individual components available in a coherent, navigable form.
Taken together, these volumes offer an enduring encounter with the moral imagination of a biographer who sought to study soul and city side by side. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives continue to speak because they treat virtue and failure with sobriety, attend to the pressures of office and fortune, and rely on narrative to launch reflection rather than to dictate conclusions. As portraits of action and character, they invite comparison across times and cultures, including our own. This collection provides a stable and comprehensive path into that conversation, presenting the Lives in a form faithful to their original design.
Author Biography
Plutarch was a Greek biographer, essayist, and philosopher from Chaeronea in Boeotia, active in the late first and early second centuries CE. Writing in Greek within the cultural sphere of the Roman Empire, he became renowned for Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, a series of paired biographies designed to illuminate character and moral choice. His works sought to instruct as well as to delight, presenting history through the lens of ethics. Alongside these Lives, a large corpus of essays now known as the Moralia explored religion, education, politics, and conduct. Together, these writings made Plutarch a foundational voice in moral biography.
Born around the middle of the first century, Plutarch studied in Athens, where he received training in philosophy, mathematics, and rhetoric. He is commonly associated with Middle Platonism, engaging sympathetically with Plato while debating Stoic and Epicurean ideas. Ancient testimonies name Ammonius among his teachers. His education stressed ethical inquiry and practical statesmanship, themes that would shape his mature writing. Travel broadened his outlook: he visited various Greek cities and spent time in Rome, where he lectured and cultivated friendships among senators and intellectuals. Through the patronage of Mestrius Florus he obtained Roman citizenship, adopting the name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.
Plutarch combined letters with public service. He held local civic offices at Chaeronea and, most prominently, served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, where he wrote about oracles and ritual. His enduring achievement, however, is the Parallel Lives, represented in this collection by Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans – Volumes 1 and 2. Each Life describes a Greek statesman or commander and a Roman counterpart, followed by a formal comparison. Among the most studied pairings are Theseus with Romulus, Lycurgus with Numa, Solon with Publicola, Themistocles with Camillus, Pericles with Fabius Maximus, Alcibiades with Coriolanus, Alexander with Caesar, and Demosthenes with Cicero.
Plutarch approached biography as moral inquiry rather than strict chronicle. He stated that character is revealed by small deeds and sayings, so he favored vivid anecdotes over exhaustive campaigns. Nonetheless, he read widely, drawing on historians, speeches, letters, and inscriptions, often weighing conflicting reports and acknowledging uncertainty. He compared upbringing, education, and civic institutions to probe how virtue and fortune shape action. The formal synkrisis, or comparison, distilled likenesses and contrasts to guide judgment. Writing in an elegant, accessible Greek, he aimed to improve readers by example, presenting courage, prudence, ambition, and excess as recurrent patterns in public life.
Beyond the Lives, Plutarch composed numerous essays later grouped as the Moralia, addressing ethics, education, political counsel, religious practice, and everyday conduct. These writings reflect a Middle Platonist outlook that affirmed divine providence and the formative power of reason, while engaging critically with Stoic fatalism and Epicurean hedonism. His role at Delphi informed discussions of ritual and oracles, and he often urged moderation, beneficence, and civic responsibility. Read together, the Lives and the Moralia articulate a coherent program of moral improvement rooted in classical traditions yet adapted to the realities of Roman imperial society, where Greek culture retained intellectual authority.
Plutarch’s biographies circulated widely in antiquity and were preserved through late antique and Byzantine scholarship. Their modern afterlife began in the Renaissance, when Jacques Amyot’s French translation of the Lives (1559) and Sir Thomas North’s English version (1579, based on Amyot) brought them to a broad readership. Shakespeare drew heavily on North for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, shaping the English historical imagination. Montaigne praised Plutarch as a guide to conduct, and humanists mined the Lives for examples of virtue and vice. Through translation and imitation, his portraits informed European education, statecraft, and literature for centuries.
Plutarch lived into the early second century, dying sometime after the reign of Trajan. In later years he continued to write, administer local affairs, and officiate at Delphi. His legacy rests on the union of historical narrative with ethical reflection, a model that shaped biography from antiquity to modern times. The Lives, as presented in Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans – Volumes 1 and 2, remain a touchstone for thinking about leadership, civic virtue, and the interplay of character and circumstance. Modern readers still consult his portraits for insight into public life, and scholars study his methods and sources.
Historical Context
Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives in the late first and early second centuries CE, as a Greek intellectual living under Roman rule. Born at Chaeronea around 46 CE and active at least into Hadrian’s reign, he stood at the intersection of Greek paideia and Roman imperial power. The collection surveys figures from archaic Greece and early Rome through the collapse of the Roman Republic and the early Principate. By pairing a Greek life with a Roman counterpart and concluding with a formal comparison, Plutarch constructs a moral and political dialogue across centuries, using biography to examine character, leadership, and civic virtue in changing constitutional environments.
The Greek lives return to the world of the polis, whose institutions framed public life from the archaic through the classical periods. Lawgivers such as Lycurgus and Solon illustrate efforts to stabilize communities through constitutional design, redistribution, and sumptuary regulation. Mechanisms like ostracism in Athens and the Spartan educational system cultivated distinct civic ideals. Plutarch’s interest in customs—public messes, magistracies, festivals—underscores how political identity was embedded in ritual and law. By paralleling Roman founders and reformers with Greek counterparts, he invites readers to assess how differing institutions shaped similar ethical challenges in communities oriented toward honor, equality, and communal defense.
The Persian Wars set a benchmark for collective action and leadership. Lives of Themistocles and Aristides frame Athens’ naval turn, coalition-building through the Delian League, and the tension between personal ambition and public good. Plutarch draws on earlier historians to highlight strategies at Salamis and the postwar struggle over tribute and hegemony. He also presents Sparta’s role as rival and partner in Greek security. These narratives capture technological and organizational shifts—the importance of trireme fleets, fortifications, and logistics—that transformed Greek power, while foregrounding debates about justice, glory, and the costs of imperial leadership within a still-fragmented Hellenic world.
The Peloponnesian War epitomizes the fragility of democratic and oligarchic orders under prolonged strain. Figures such as Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lysander embody divergent strategies: cautious stewardship, pious conservatism, charismatic risk-taking, and hard-edged Spartan realpolitik. Plutarch’s portraits explore mobilization, fiscal pressures, and the corrosive effects of factionalism. He tracks how war reshaped civic discourse, public morality, and alliances, while keeping the focus on character—how prudence, rashness, and integrity fare amid scarcity and fear. By pairing Greek leaders with Roman analogues, he emphasizes recurrent dilemmas of command, accountability, and popular expectation in states facing existential threats.
Fourth-century Greece shifted from Athenian and Spartan rivalry to Theban ascendancy and, eventually, Macedonian dominance. Lives such as Pelopidas and Agesilaus trace new military formations, like the Theban Sacred Band, and interstate diplomacy through leagues and coalitions. Campaigns in Asia Minor and shifting balances of power reveal the limits of polis autonomy. Plutarch’s attention to leadership style—discipline, persuasion, patronage—shows how personal authority functioned in looser federations. Persistent themes include the maintenance of alliances, management of wealth from war, and the intersection of civic duty with personal loyalties as Greek states navigated increasingly complex geopolitical realities.
Alexander the Great’s career marks a decisive transformation from city-states to imperial monarchy. In Alexander’s Life, Plutarch presents rapid conquest, logistical innovation, and cultural encounter across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. The Macedonian phalanx coordinated with cavalry, siegecraft, and administrative improvisation to create a multiethnic empire. Plutarch examines education, self-control, and fortune, probing how a ruler’s passions and philosophical training condition policy. He also registers the ideological shock of universal kingship for Greeks accustomed to civic equality, laying groundwork for later comparisons with Julius Caesar and for reflections on how personal ambition reshapes political forms.
The Hellenistic centuries after Alexander feature successor kingdoms, professional armies, and intensified court politics. Lives like Eumenes and Demetrius chronicle the Wars of the Diadochi, where resource management, siege technology, and mercenary recruitment proved decisive. Pyrrhus’ campaigns in Italy and Sicily illustrate mobile coalitions, war finance, and the high costs of victory. Philopoemen’s efforts within the Achaean League highlight experiments in federal governance and military reform. Plutarch depicts how charisma and royal display functioned alongside civic traditions, and how Greek leaders negotiated autonomy amid monarchies and, increasingly, Rome’s arbitration—foreshadowing the cultural and political entanglements that structure many Greek–Roman pairings.
Parallel Lives presents the Roman Republic as a civic order organized by magistracies, senate authority, and the ideal of mos maiorum. Early and middle Republican figures such as Camillus, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, and Cato the Elder anchor discussions of discipline, agrarian virtue, sumptuary restraint, and religious observance. Through their careers, readers see Rome’s expansion against Italian peoples and Carthage, the importance of the legion’s flexibility, and the ritual frameworks—augury, vows, triumphs—that legitimated command. Plutarch’s Roman material mirrors Greek debates about virtue and luxury, but in a society where citizenship, clientela, and the cursus honorum regulated the competition for honor and power.
Greek–Roman encounters intensify in Lives like Flamininus and Aemilius Paulus. Titus Quinctius Flamininus proclaimed the “freedom of the Greeks” at the Isthmian Games in 196 BCE, while Lucius Aemilius Paulus defeated King Perseus of Macedon at Pydna in 168 BCE. Plutarch juxtaposes diplomatic rhetoric and military realities, noting displays of clemency, cultural patronage, and the politics of triumph. These biographies register the asymmetry of power and the allure of Greek culture for Roman elites. They also expose Greek communities’ strategies under Roman arbitration—petitioning, alliances, and appeals to shared Hellenic identity—as autonomy gave way to protectorate and province.
The late Republic’s social crises appear through reform and reaction. In the paired Lives of Agis and Cleomenes with Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Plutarch compares Greek and Roman attempts to address inequality through land redistribution and institutional change. Lives of Marius and Sulla showcase the militarization of politics: army recruitment tied to commanders, civil war, and proscriptions as instruments of regime change. Through these figures, Plutarch explores how economic dislocation, provincial wealth, and competition for glory undermined consensus. His moral emphasis highlights the personal choices that accelerate structural fractures, setting the stage for the dominance of singular leaders.
Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar embody the Republic’s final transformation. Their campaigns—against pirates, in the East, and in Gaul—widen Rome’s horizons and concentrate prestige. Plutarch tracks extraordinary commands, public entertainments, and rival patronage networks that bypass traditional checks. The Life of Caesar, paired with Alexander, explores speed, clemency, and administrative acumen, while Crassus, matched with Nicias, illustrates misjudgment and the hazards of overreach. Pompey, paralleled with Agesilaus, reflects military brilliance entangled with political miscalculation. These narratives render the Republic’s legal flexibility and electoral competition vulnerable to personal armies, mass spectacle, and the charisma of conquest.
Oratory and philosophy shape governance in the paired Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero. Plutarch situates eloquence within education, civic participation, and resistance to autocracy—Athenian appeals against Macedon and Roman denunciations in the tumult after Caesar’s death. He quotes letters and speeches to illuminate strategy and temperament, while noting the limitations of rhetoric amid shifting power. These biographies highlight the diffusion of Greek paideia in Rome: libraries, teachers, and philosophical schools that trained elites in argument, ethics, and statesmanship. Intellectual capital appears as both instrument and refuge, binding the Greek and Roman elite worlds across political transformations.
The theme of principled opposition runs through lives such as Phocion and Cato the Younger, and through the pairing of Dion with Brutus. Plutarch presents moral steadfastness confronting pragmatic compromise and authoritarian consolidation. Dion’s intervention in Syracuse and Brutus’s role in Caesar’s assassination are read through the lens of philosophical commitment, friendship, and duty to the polity. In Phocion and Cato, austerity and legalism face the realities of foreign dominance and civil discord. These narratives invite reflection on conscience, legitimacy, and the costs of refusal, while acknowledging the tragic constraints imposed by larger shifts in power.
Plutarch also extends his canvas into the early Principate with the unpaired lives of Galba and Otho, offering a view of the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 CE. These short biographies probe succession without clear rules, the volatility of military loyalty, and the role of urban plebs and praetorians in imperial politics. They function as a coda to Republican narratives, contrasting elective magistracies with dynastic and army-driven acclamation. By including them, Plutarch links the moral patterns of earlier careers to a world where the emperor’s character and the management of elite coalitions determine stability.
Plutarch wrote as a Middle Platonist and prominent civic figure—magistrate in Chaeronea, priest at Delphi—active in the cultural movement later termed the Second Sophistic. His Greek perspective under empire shapes the Lives’ emphasis on self-mastery, providence, and ethical education. He addresses Sosius Senecio in several prefaces, situating his work within elite networks that spanned Greece and Rome. Using sources such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Caesar, and Cicero, he privileges character-revealing anecdotes and inscriptions. The synkrisis at each pair’s end invites comparative judgment, while his treatment of founders like Theseus and Romulus openly signals the mixture of myth and history.
Technological and cultural conditions informed Plutarch’s methods. Books circulated as papyrus rolls; learned exchange relied on libraries, tutors, and lettered friendship. Rhetorical education trained readers to analyze chreiai—brief, illustrative anecdotes—mirrored in Plutarch’s selection of sayings and scenes. Religious practice and divination permeated public life, and as Delphic priest he took omens and cult seriously without surrendering critical sense. The Lives thus integrate civic religion, law, and custom with ethical reflection. Their compositional strategies—digressions on institutions, portraits of private habit—reflect a world where moral philosophy and historical exempla served as the principal technologies of civic instruction.
Across the collection, Plutarch models a historiography oriented toward moral causation. He rarely offers detailed campaigns for their own sake; instead he asks how habit, education, and passion incline leaders toward prudence or error. Comparisons such as Lycurgus–Numa, Solon–Publicola, Themistocles–Camillus, Pericles–Fabius Maximus, Alcibiades–Coriolanus, Demosthenes–Cicero, Alexander–Caesar, and Timoleon–Aemilius Paulus frame a continuous conversation about law, persuasion, and restraint. These pairings dramatize convergences between Greek and Roman debates on liberty and authority, and reveal how shifts in military technology, finance, and administration test enduring virtues like courage, justice, and temperance across very different constitutional landscapes.|Early textual transmission preserved the Lives through Byzantine manuscript culture, after which printing transformed their reach. Jacques Amyot’s influential French translation (1559) helped shape Renaissance ethics and style; Sir Thomas North’s English version (1579), adapted from Amyot, furnished Shakespeare with material for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Later, the Dryden-led English edition (late seventeenth century) and J. S. Watson’s and Arthur Hugh Clough’s nineteenth-century revisions made the work standard reading. Enlightenment writers, including Rousseau, recommended Plutarch for moral education. In each age, translators and editors reframed the Lives to address contemporary politics and pedagogical aims.|The two-volume Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans distills this longue durée into an accessible syllabus of exempla. The collection functions simultaneously as history, ethical handbook, and meditation on empire. For ancient readers, it offered guidance on conduct within civic and imperial structures; for later audiences, it served as a mirror of republican virtue, a caution about charismatic power, and a resource for literary and political imagination. Modern interpreters read the Lives as reflections of Greek identity under Rome and as crafted narratives shaped by sources and genre. Across centuries, readers return to its comparisons to interrogate leadership, law, and conscience.
Synopsis (Selection)
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans - Volume 1
This volume establishes the Parallel Lives project, pairing notable Greek figures with Roman counterparts to examine character, civic virtue, and the uses of power. Through vivid anecdotes, set speeches, and moral comparison, it argues that leadership springs as much from education and temperament as from luck and circumstance. The tone is instructive and inquisitive, prioritizing ethical reflection and the interplay of private motive with public consequence over strict chronology.
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans - Volume 2
This volume extends and complicates the comparative method, tracing how ambition, policy, and temperament steer communities toward reform, rivalry, and crisis across Greek and Roman worlds. The portraits deepen the focus on inner habit versus public decision, drawing measured lessons about moderation, loyalty, and the dangers of charismatic authority. The tone is reflective and often somber, using digressions and carefully staged scenes to probe causation while inviting readers to weigh character as the engine of history.
Parallel Lives
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans - Volume 1
Theseus
As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, Beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther. Yet, after publishing an account of Lycurgus the lawgiver and Numa the king, I thought I might, not without reason, ascend as high as to Romulus, being brought by my history so near to his time.
Considering therefore with myself
Whom shall I set so great a man to face? Or whom oppose? who’s equal to the place?
(as Aeschylus expresses it), I found none so fit as him that peopled the beautiful and far-famed city of Athens, to be set in opposition with the father of the invincible and renowned city of Rome. Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. In any case, however, where it shall be found contumaciously slighting credibility, and refusing to be reduced to anything like probable fact, we shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the stories of antiquity.
Theseus seemed to me to resemble Romulus in many particulars. Both of them, born out of wedlock and of uncertain parentage, had the repute of being sprung from the gods.
Both warriors; that by all the world’s allowed.
Both of them united with strength of body an equal vigor mind; and of the two most famous cities of the world the one built Rome, and the other made Athens be inhabited. Both stand charged with the rape of women; neither of them could avoid domestic misfortunes nor jealousy at home; but towards the close of their lives are both of them said to have incurred great odium with their countrymen, if, that is, we may take the stories least like poetry as our guide to the truth.
The lineage of Theseus, by his father’s side, ascends as high as to Erechtheus and the first inhabitants of Attica. By his mother’s side he was descended of Pelops. For Pelops was the most powerful of all the kings of Peloponnesus, not so much by the greatness of his riches as the multitude of his children, having married many daughters to chief men, and put many sons in places of command in the towns round about him. One of whom named Pittheus, grandfather to Theseus, was governor of the small city of the Troezenians, and had the repute of a man of the greatest knowledge and wisdom of his time; which then, it seems, consisted chiefly in grave maxims, such as the poet Hesiod got his great fame by, in his book of Works and Days. And, indeed, among these is one that they ascribe to Pittheus —
Unto a friend suffice A stipulated price;
which, also, Aristotle mentions. And Euripides, by calling Hippolytus ” scholar of the holy Pittheus,” shows the opinion that the world had of him.
Aegeus, being desirous of children, and consulting the oracle of Delphi, received the celebrated answer which forbade him the company of any woman before his return to Athens. But the oracle being so obscure as not to satisfy him that he was clearly forbid this, he went to Troezen, and communicated to Pittheus the voice of the god, which was in this manner —
Loose not the wine-skin foot, thou chief of men, Until to Athens thou art come again.
Pittheus, therefore, taking advantage from the obscurity of the oracle, prevailed upon him, it is uncertain whether by persuasion or deceit, to lie with his daughter Aethra. Aegeus afterwards, knowing her whom he had lain with to be Pittheus’s daughter, and suspecting her to be with child by him, left a sword and a pair of shoes, hiding them under a great stone that had a hollow in it exactly fitting them; and went away making her only privy to it, and commanding her, if she brought forth a son who, when he came to man’s estate, should be able to lift up the stone and take away what he had left there, she should send him away to him with those things with all secrecy, and with injunctions to him as much as possible to conceal his journey from every one; for he greatly feared the Pallantidae, who were continually mutinying against him, and despised him for his want of children, they themselves being fifty brothers, all sons of Pallas.
When Aethra was delivered of a son, some say that he was immediately named Theseus, from the tokens which his father had put under the stone; others that he received his name afterwards at Athens, when Aegeus acknowledged him for his son. He was brought up under his grandfather Pittheus, and had a tutor and attendant set over him named Connidas, to whom the Athenians, even to this time, the day before the feast that is dedicated to Theseus, sacrifice a ram, giving this honor to his memory upon much juster grounds than to Silanio and Parrhasius, for making pictures and statues of Theseus. There being then a custom for the Grecian youth, upon their first coming to man’s estate, to go to Delphi and offer first-fruits of their hair to the god, Theseus also went thither, and a place there to this day is yet named Thesea, as it is said, from him. He clipped only the fore part of his head, as Homer says the Abantes did. And this sort of tonsure was from him named Theseis. The Abantes first used it, not in imitation of the Arabians, as some imagine, nor of the Mysians, but because they were a warlike people, and used to close fighting, and above all other nations accustomed to engage hand to hand; as Archilochus testifies in these verses:—
Slings shall not whirl, nor many arrows fly, When on the plain the battle joins; but swords, Man against man, the deadly conflict try, As is the practice of Euboea’s lords Skilled with the spear. —
Therefore that they might not give their enemies a hold by their hair, they cut it in this manner. They write also that this was the reason why Alexander gave command to his captains that all the beards of the Macedonians should be shaved, as being the readiest hold for an enemy.
Aethra for some time concealed the true parentage of Theseus, and a report was given out by Pittheus that he was begotten by Neptune; for the Troezenians pay Neptune the highest veneration. He is their tutelar god, to him they offer all their first-fruits, and in his honor stamp their money with a trident.
Theseus displaying not only great strength of body, but equal bravery, and a quickness alike and force of understanding, his mother Aethra, conducting him to the stone, and informing him who was his true father, commanded him to take from thence the tokens that Aegeus had left, and to sail to Athens. He without any difficulty set himself to the stone and lifted it up; but refused to take his journey by sea, though it was much the safer way, and though his mother and grandfather begged him to do so. For it was at that time very dangerous to go by land on the road to Athens, no part of it being free from robbers and murderers. That age produced a sort of men, in force of hand, and swiftness of foot, and strength of body, excelling the ordinary rate, and wholly incapable of fatigue; making use, however, of these gifts of nature to no good or profitable purpose for mankind, but rejoicing and priding themselves in insolence, and taking the benefit of their superior strength in the exercise of inhumanity and cruelty, and in seizing, forcing, and committing all manner of outrages upon every thing that fell into their hands; all respect for others, all justice, they thought, all equity and humanity, though naturally lauded by common people, either out of want of courage to commit injuries or fear to receive them, yet no way concerned those who were strong enough to win for themselves. Some of these, Hercules destroyed and cut off in his passage through these countries, but some, escaping his notice while he was passing by, fled and hid themselves, or else were spared by him in contempt of their abject submission; and after that Hercules fell into misfortune, and, having slain Iphitus, retired to Lydia, and for a long time was there slave to Omphale, a punishment which he had imposed upon himself for the murder, then, indeed, Lydia enjoyed high peace and security, but in Greece and the countries about it the like villanies again revived and broke out, there being none to repress or chastise them. It was therefore a very hazardous journey to travel by land from Athens to Peloponnesus; and Pittheus, giving him an exact account of each of these robbers and villains, their strength, and the cruelty they used to all strangers, tried to persuade Theseus to go by sea. But he, it seems, had long since been secretly fired by the glory of Hercules, held him in the highest estimation, and was never more satisfied than in listening to any that gave an account of him; especially those that had seen him, or had been present at any action or saying of his. So that he was altogether in the same state of feeling as, in after ages, Themistocles was, when he said that he could not sleep for the trophy of Miltiades; entertaining such admiration for the virtue of Hercules, that in the night his dreams were all of that hero’s actions. and in the day a continual emulation stirred him up to perform the like. Besides, they were related, being born of cousins-german. For Aethra was daughter of Pittheus, and Alcmena of Lysidice; and Lysidice and Pittheus were brother and sister, children of Hippodamia and Pelops. He thought it therefore a dishonorable thing, and not to be endured, that Hercules should go out everywhere, and purge both land and sea from wicked men, and he himself should fly from the like adventures that actually came in his way; disgracing his reputed father by a mean flight by sea, and not showing his true one as good evidence of the greatness of his birth by noble and worthy actions, as by the tokens that he brought with him, the shoes and the sword.
With this mind and these thoughts, he set forward with a design to do injury to nobody, but to repel and revenge himself of all those that should offer any. And first of all, in a set combat, he slew Periphetes, in the neighborhood of Epidaurus, who used a club for his arms, and from thence had the name of Corynetes, or the club-bearer; who seized upon him, and forbade him to go forward in his journey. Being pleased with the club, he took it, and made it his weapon, continuing to use it as Hercules did the lion’s skin, on whose shoulders that served to prove how huge a beast he had killed; and to the same end Theseus carried about him this club; overcome indeed by him, but now, in his hands, invincible.
Passing on further towards the Isthmus of Peloponnesus, he slew Sinnis, often surnamed the Bender of Pines, after the same manner in which he himself had destroyed many others before. And this he did without having either practiced or ever learnt the art of bending these trees, to show that natural strength is above all art. This Sinnis had a daughter of remarkable beauty and stature, called Perigune, who, when her father was killed, fled, and was sought after everywhere by Theseus; and coming into a place overgrown with brushwood shrubs, and asparagus-thorn, there, in a childlike, innocent manner, prayed and begged them, as if they understood her, to give her shelter, with vows that if she escaped she would never cut them down nor burn them. But Theseus calling upon her, and giving her his promise that he would use her with respect, and offer her no injury, she came forth, and in due time bore him a son, named Melanippus; but afterwards was married to Deioneus, the son of Eurytus, the Oechalian, Theseus himself giving her to him. Ioxus, the son of this Melanippus who was born to Theseus, accompanied Ornytus in the colony that he carried with him into Caria, whence it is a family usage amongst the people called Ioxids, both male and female, never to burn either shrubs or asparagus-thorn, but to respect and honor them.
The Crommyonian sow, which they called Phaea, was a savage and formidable wild beast, by no means an enemy to be despised. Theseus killed her, going out of his way on purpose to meet and engage her, so that he might not seem to perform all his great exploits out of mere necessity; being also of opinion that it was the part of a brave man to chastise villainous and wicked men when attacked by them, but to seek out and overcome the more noble wild beasts. Others relate that Phaea was a woman, a robber full of cruelty and lust, that lived in Crommyon, and had the name of Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners, and afterwards was killed by Theseus. He slew also Sciron, upon the borders of Megara, casting him down from the rocks, being, as most report, a notorious robber of all passengers, and, as others add, accustomed, out of insolence and wantonness, to stretch forth his feet to strangers, commanding them to wash them, and then while they did it, with a kick to send them down the rock into the sea. The writers of Megara, however, in contradiction to the received report, and, as Simonides expresses it, “fighting with all antiquity,” contend that Sciron was neither a robber nor doer of violence, but a punisher of all such, and the relative and friend of good and just men; for Aeacus, they say, was ever esteemed a man of the greatest sanctity of all the Greeks; and Cychreus, the Salaminian, was honored at Athens with divine worship; and the virtues of Peleus and Telamon were not unknown to any one. Now Sciron was son-in-law to Cychreus, father-in-law to Aeacus, and grandfather to Peleus and Telamon, who were both of them sons of Endeis, the daughter of Sciron and Chariclo; it was not probable, therefore, that the best of men should make these alliances with one who was worst, giving and receiving mutually what was of greatest value and most dear to them. Theseus, by their account, did not slay Sciron in his first journey to Athens, but afterwards, when he took Eleusis, a city of the Megarians, having circumvented Diocles, the governor. Such are the contradictions in this story. In Eleusis he killed Cercyon, the Arcadian, in a wrestling match. And going on a little farther, in Erineus, he slew Damastes, otherwise called Procrustes, forcing his body to the size of his own bed, as he himself was used to do with all strangers; this he did in imitation of Hercules, who always returned upon his assailants the same sort of violence that they offered to him; sacrificed Busiris, killed Antaeus in wrestling, and Cycnus in single combat, and Termerus by breaking his skull in pieces (whence, they say, comes the proverb of “a Termerian mischief”), for it seems Termerus killed passengers that he met, by running with his head against them. And so also Theseus proceeded in the punishment of evil men, who underwent the same violence from him which they had inflicted upon others, justly suffering after the manner of their own injustice.
As he went forward on his journey, and was come as far as the river Cephisus, some of the race of the Phytalidae met him and saluted him, and, upon his desire to use the purifications, then in custom, they performed them with all the usual ceremonies, and, having offered propitiatory sacrifices to the gods, invited him and entertained him at their house, a kindness which, in all his journey hitherto, he had not met.
On the eighth day of Cronius, now called Hecatombaeon, he arrived at Athens, where he found the public affairs full of all confusion, and divided into parties and factions, Aegeus also, and his whole private family, laboring under the same distemper; for Medea, having fled from Corinth, and promised Aegeus to make him, by her art, capable of having children, was living with him. She first was aware of Theseus, whom as yet Aegeus did not know, and he being in years, full of jealousies and suspicions, and fearing every thing by reason of the faction that was then in the city, she easily persuaded him to kill him by poison at a banquet, to which he was to be invited as a stranger. He, coming to the entertainment, thought it not fit to discover himself at once, but, willing to give his father the occasion of first finding him out, the meat being on the table, he drew his sword as if he designed to cut with it; Aegeus, at once recognizing the token, threw down the cup of poison, and, questioning his son, embraced him, and, having gathered together all his citizens, owned him publicly before them, who, on their part, received him gladly for the fame of his greatness and bravery; and it is said, that when the cup fell, the poison was spilt there where now is the enclosed space in the Delphinium; for in that place stood Aegeus’s house, and the figure of Mercury on the east side of the temple is called the Mercury of Aegeus’s gate.
The sons of Pallas, who before were quiet, upon expectation of recovering the kingdom after Aegeus’s death, who was without issue, as soon as Theseus appeared and was acknowledged the successor, highly resenting that Aegeus first, an adopted son only of Pandion, and not at all related to the family of Erechtheus, should be holding the kingdom, and that after him, Theseus, a visitor and stranger, should be destined to succeed to it, broke out into open war. And, dividing themselves into two companies, one part of them marched openly from Sphettus, with their father, against the city, the other, hiding themselves in the village of Gargettus, lay in ambush, with a design to set upon the enemy on both sides. They had with them a crier of the township of Agnus, named Leos, who discovered to Theseus all the designs of the Pallantidae He immediately fell upon those that lay in ambuscade, and cut them all off; upon tidings of which Pallas and his company fled and were dispersed.
From hence they say is derived the custom among the people of the township of Pallene to have no marriages or any alliance with the people of Agnus, nor to suffer the criers to pronounce in their proclamations the words used in all other parts of the country, Acouete Leoi (Hear ye people), hating the very sound of Leo, because of the treason of Leos.
Theseus, longing to be in action, and desirous also to make himself popular, left Athens to fight with the bull of Marathon, which did no small mischief to the inhabitants of Tetrapolis. And having overcome it, he brought it alive in triumph through the city, and afterwards sacrificed it to the Delphinian Apollo. The story of Hecale, also, of her receiving and entertaining Theseus in this expedition, seems to be not altogether void of truth; for the townships round about, meeting upon a certain day, used to offer a sacrifice, which they called Hecalesia, to Jupiter Hecaleius, and to pay honor to Hecale, whom, by a diminutive name, they called Hecalene, because she, while entertaining Theseus, who was quite a youth, addressed him, as old people do, with similar endearing diminutives; and having made a vow to Jupiter for him as he was going to the fight, that, if he returned in safety, she would offer sacrifices in thanks of it, and dying before he came back, she had these honors given her by way of return for her hospitality, by the command of Theseus, as Philochorus tells us.
Not long after arrived the third time from Crete the collectors of the tribute which the Athenians paid them upon the following occasion. Androgeus having been treacherously murdered in the confines of Attica, not only Minos, his father, put the Athenians to extreme distress by a perpetual war, but the gods also laid waste their country both famine and pestilence lay heavy upon them, and even their rivers were dried up. Being told by the oracle that, if they appeased and reconciled Minos, the anger of the gods would cease and they should enjoy rest from the miseries they labored under, they sent heralds, and with much supplication were at last reconciled, entering into an agreement to send to Crete every nine years a tribute of seven young men and as many virgins, as most writers agree in stating; and the most poetical story adds, that the Minotaur destroyed them, or that, wandering in the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there; and that this Minotaur was (as Euripides hath it)
A mingled form, where two strange shapes combined, And different natures, bull and man, were joined.
But Philochorus says that the Cretans will by no means allow the truth of this, but say that the labyrinth was only an ordinary prison, having no other bad quality but that it secured the prisoners from escaping, and that Minos, having instituted games in honor of Androgeus, gave, as a reward to the victors, these youths, who in the mean time were kept in the labyrinth; and that the first that overcame in those games was one of the greatest power and command among them, named Taurus, a man of no merciful or gentle disposition, who treated the Athenians that were made his prize in a proud and cruel manner. Also Aristotle himself, in the account that he gives of the form of government of the Bottiaeans, is manifestly of opinion that the youths were not slain by Minos, but spent the remainder of their days in slavery in Crete; that the Cretans, in former times, to acquit themselves of an ancient vow which they had made, were used to send an offering of the first-fruits of their men to Delphi, and that some descendants of these Athenian slaves were mingled with them and sent amongst them, and, unable to get their living there, removed from thence, first into Italy, and settled about Japygia; from thence again, that they removed to Thrace, and were named Bottiaeans and that this is the reason why, in a certain sacrifice, the Bottiaean girls sing a hymn beginning Let us go to Athens. This may show us how dangerous a thing it is to incur the hostility of a city that is mistress of eloquence and song. For Minos was always ill spoken of, and represented ever as a very wicked man, in the Athenian theaters; neither did Hesiod avail him by calling him “the most royal Minos,” nor Homer, who styles him “Jupiter’s familiar friend;” the tragedians got the better, and from the vantage ground of the stage showered down obloquy upon him, as a man of cruelty and violence; whereas, in fact, he appears to have been a king and a lawgiver, and Rhadamanthus a judge under him, administering the statutes that he ordained.
Now when the time of the third tribute was come, and the fathers who had any young men for their sons were to proceed by lot to the choice of those that were to be sent, there arose fresh discontents and accusations against Aegeus among the people, who were full of grief and indignation that he, who was the cause of all their miseries, was the only person exempt from the punishment; adopting and settling his kingdom upon a bastard and foreign son, he took no thought, they said, of their destitution and loss, not of bastards, but lawful children. These things sensibly affected Theseus, who, thinking it but just not to disregard, but rather partake of, the sufferings of his fellow citizens, offered himself for one without any lot. All else were struck with admiration for the nobleness and with love for the goodness of the act; and Aegeus, after prayers and entreaties, finding him inflexible and not to be persuaded, proceeded to the choosing of the rest by lot. Hellanicus, however, tells us that the Athenians did not send the young men and virgins by lot, but that Minos himself used to come and make his own choice, and pitched upon Theseus before all others; according to the conditions agreed upon between them, namely, that the Athenians should furnish them with a ship, and that the young men that were to sail with him should carry no weapon of war; but that if the Minotaur was destroyed, the tribute should cease.
On the two former occasions of the payment of the tribute, entertaining no hopes of safety or return, they sent out the ship with a black sail, as to unavoidable destruction; but now, Theseus encouraging his father and speaking greatly of himself, as confident that he should kill the Minotaur, he gave the pilot another sail, which was white, commanding him, as he returned, if Theseus were safe, to make use of that; but if not, to sail with the black one, and to hang out that sign of his misfortune. Simonides says that the sail which Aegeus delivered to the pilot was not white, but
Scarlet, in the juicy bloom Of the living oak-tree steeped,
and that this was to be the sign of their escape. Phereclus, son of Amarsyas, according to Simonides, was pilot of the ship. But Philochorus says Theseus had sent him by Scirus, from Salamis, Nausithous to be his steersman, and Phaeax his look-out-man in the prow, the Athenians having as yet not applied themselves to navigation; and that Scirus did this because one of the young men, Menesthes, was his daughter’s son; and this the chapels of Nausithous and Phaeax, built by Theseus near the temple of Scirus, confirm. He adds, also, that the feast named Cybernesia was in honor of them. The lot being cast, and Theseus having received out of the Prytaneum those upon whom it fell, he went to the Delphinium, and made an offering for them to Apollo of his suppliant’s badge, which was a bough of a consecrated olive tree, with white wool tied about it.
Having thus performed his devotion, he went to sea, the sixth day of Munychion, on which day even to this time the Athenians send their virgins to the same temple to make supplication to the gods. It is farther reported that he was commanded by the oracle at Delphi to make Venus his guide, and to invoke her as the companion and conductress of his voyage, and that, as he was sacrificing a she goat to her by the seaside, it was suddenly changed into a he, and for this cause that goddess had the name of Epitrapia.
When he arrived at Crete, as most of the ancient historians as well as poets tell us, having a clue of thread given him by Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him, and being instructed by her how to use it so as to conduct him through the windings of the labyrinth, he escaped out of it and slew the Minotaur, and sailed back, taking along with him Ariadne and the young Athenian captives. Pherecydes adds that he bored holes in the bottoms of the Cretan ships to hinder their pursuit. Demon writes that Taurus, the chief captain of Minos, was slain by Theseus at the mouth of the port, in a naval combat, as he was sailing out for Athens. But Philochorus gives us the story thus: That at the setting forth of the yearly games by king Minos, Taurus was expected to carry away the prize, as he had done before; and was much grudged the honor. His character and manners made his power hateful, and he was accused moreover of too near familiarity with Pasiphae, for which reason, when Theseus desired the combat, Minos readily complied. And as it was a custom in Crete that the women also should be admitted to the sight of these games, Ariadne, being present, was struck with admiration of the manly beauty of Theseus, and the vigor and address which he showed in the combat, overcoming all that encountered with him. Minos, too, being extremely pleased with him, especially because he had overthrown and disgraced Taurus, voluntarily gave up the young captives to Theseus, and remitted the tribute to the Athenians. Clidemus gives an account peculiar to himself, very ambitiously, and beginning a great way back: That it was a decree consented to by all Greece, that no vessel from any place, containing above five persons, should be permitted to sail, Jason only excepted, who was made captain of the great ship Argo, to sail about and scour the sea of pirates. But Daedalus having escaped from Crete, and flying by sea to Athens, Minos, contrary to this decree, pursued him with his ships of war, was forced by a storm upon Sicily, and there ended his life. After his decease, Deucalion, his son, desiring a quarrel with the Athenians, sent to them, demanding that they should deliver up Daedalus to him, threatening, upon their refusal, to put to death all the young Athenians whom his father had received as hostages from the city. To this angry message Theseus returned a very gentle answer, excusing himself that he could not deliver up Daedalus, who was nearly related to him, being his cousin-german, his mother being Merope, the daughter of Erechtheus. In the meanwhile he secretly prepared a navy, part of it at home near the village of the Thymoetadae, a place of no resort, and far from any common roads, the other part by his grandfather Pittheus’s means at Troezen, that so his design might be carried on with the greatest secrecy. As soon as ever his fleet was in readiness, he set sail, having with him Daedalus and other exiles from Crete for his guides; and none of the Cretans having any knowledge of his coming, but imagining, when they saw his fleet, that they were friends and vessels of their own, he soon made himself master of the port, and, immediately making a descent, reached Gnossus before any notice of his coming, and, in a battle before the gates of the labyrinth, put Deucalion and all his guards to the sword. The government by this means falling to Ariadne, he made a league with her, and received the captives of her, and ratified a perpetual friendship between the Athenians and the Cretans, whom he engaged under an oath never again to commence any war with Athens.
There are yet many other traditions about these things, and as many concerning Ariadne, all inconsistent with each other. Some relate that she hung herself, being deserted by Theseus. Others that she was carried away by his sailors to the isle of Naxos, and married to Oenarus, priest of Bacchus; and that Theseus left her because he fell in love with another,
For Aegle’s love was burning in his breast;
a verse which Hereas, the Megarian, says, was formerly in the poet Hesiod’s works, but put out by Pisistratus, in like manner as he added in Homer’s Raising of the Dead, to gratify the Athenians, the line
Theseus, Pirithous, mighty sons of gods.
Others say Ariadne had sons also by Theseus, Oenopion and Staphylus; and among these is the poet Ion of Chios, who writes of his own native city
Which once Oenopion, son of Theseus, built.
But the more famous of the legendary stories everybody (as I may say) has in his mouth. In Paeon, however, the Amathusian, there is a story given, differing from the rest. For he writes that Theseus, being driven by a storm upon the isle of Cyprus, and having aboard with him Ariadne, big with child, and extremely discomposed with the rolling of the sea, set her on shore, and left her there alone, to return himself and help the ship, when, on a sudden, a violent wind carried him again out to sea. That the women of the island received Ariadne very kindly, and did all they could to console and alleviate her distress at being left behind. That they counterfeited kind letters, and delivered them to her, as sent from Theseus, and, when she fell in labor, were diligent in performing to her every needful service; but that she died before she could be delivered, and was honorably interred. That soon after Theseus returned, and was greatly afflicted for her loss, and at his departure left a sum of money among the people of the island, ordering them to do sacrifice to Ariadne; and caused two little images to be made and dedicated to her, one of silver and the other of brass. Moreover, that on the second day of Gorpiaeus, which is sacred to Ariadne, they have this ceremony among their sacrifices, to have a youth lie down and with his voice and gesture represent the pains of a woman in travail; and that the Amathusians call the grove in which they show her tomb, the grove of Venus Ariadne.
Differing yet from this account, some of the Naxians write that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes, one of whom, they say, was married to Bacchus, in the isle of Naxos, and bore the children Staphylus and his brother; but that the other, of a later age, was carried off by Theseus, and, being afterwards deserted by him, retired to Naxos with her nurse Corcyna, whose grave they yet show. That this Ariadne also died there, and was worshiped by the island, but in a different manner from the former; for her day is celebrated with general joy and revelling, but all the sacrifices performed to the latter are attended with mourning and gloom.
Now Theseus, in his return from Crete, put in at Delos, and, having sacrificed to the god of the island, dedicated to the temple the image of Venus which Ariadne had given him, and danced with the young Athenians a dance that, in memory of him, they say is still preserved among the inhabitants of Delos, consisting in certain measured turnings and returnings, imitative of the windings and twistings of the labyrinth. And this dance, as Dicaearchus writes, is called among the Delians, the Crane. This he danced round the Ceratonian Altar, so called from its consisting of horns taken from the left side of the head. They say also that he instituted games in Delos where he was the first that began the custom of giving a palm to the victors.
