Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/238

 06 HISTORY OF GREECE. detail the chivalrous career of Theseus, who is found both in the Kalydonian boar-hunt and in the Argonautic expedition his personal and victorious encounters with the robbers Sinnis, Pro- crustes, Periphetes, Sciron and others his valuable service in ridding his country of the Krommyonian sow and the Maratho nian bull his conquest of the Minotaur in Krete, and his escape from the dangers of the labyrinth by the aid of Ariadne, whom he subsequently carries off and abandons his many amorous adventures, and his expeditions both against the Amazons and into the under- world along with Peirithous. 1 Thucydides delineates the character of Theseus as a man who combined sagacity with political power, and who conferred upon his country the inestimable benefit of uniting all the separate and self-governing demes of Attica into one common political society. a From the well-earned reverence attached to the assertion of Thucydides, it has been customary to reason upon this assertion as if it were historically authentic, and to treat the romantic attributes which we find in Plutarch and Diodorus as if they were fiction superinduced upon this basis of fact. Such a view of the case is in my judgment erroneous. The athletic and amorous knight-errant is the old version of the character the profound 1 Ovid, Metamorph. vii. 433. .................. " Te, maxime Theseu, Mirata est Marathon Cretsei sanguine Tauri : Quodque Suis securus arat Cromyona colonus, Munus opusque tuum est. Tellus Epidauria per te Clavigeram vidit Vulcani occumbere prolem : Vidit et immanem Cephisias ora Procrustem. Cercyonis letura vidit Cerealis Eleugin. Occidit ille Sinis," etc. Eespecting the amours of The'seus, Ister especially seems to have entered into great details ; but some of them were noticed both in the Hesiodic poems and by Kekrops, not to mention Pherekydes (Athen. xiii. p. 557^. Peirithous, the intimate friend and companion of Theseus, is the eponymous hero of the Attic deme or gens Perithoidae (Ephorus ap. Photium, v. Ilfpi- Kal dviarbf, rd re aM.a duKOfffiqae rijv wpav, Kal Kara^vaaf ruv aM.cn wavraf.
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