The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

Author’s Note

THE 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.”