Theseus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A legendary Ancient Greek hero most famous for defeating the minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete.
Adaptations of the myth
Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) is a dramatic retelling of the Theseus legend through the return from Crete to Athens. While fictional, it is generally faithful to the spirit and flavor of the best-known variations of the original story. The sequel is The Bull from the Sea (1962), about the hero's later career. Theseus is also a prominent character as the Duke of Athens in William Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare draws on Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida, whence the use of the anachronistic term "Duke": when Boccaccio and Chaucer were writing in the fourteenth century, there was an actual Duke of Athens. Hippolyta also appears in both plays.
John Dempsey's "Ariadne's Brother: A Novel on the Fall of Bronze Age Crete" (Athens, Greece: Kalendis 1996, 679pp., ISBN 960-219-062-0) tells the Minoan Cretan version of these events based on both archaeology and myth.
Steven Pressfield's Last of the Amazons is a fictional account of Theseus meeting and subsequent marriage to Antiope and the ensuing war. Theseus also appears as a major character in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale
Jorge Luis Borges also presents an interesting variation of the myth in a short story, told from Asterion's point-of-view, "La Casa de Asterion" ("The House of Asterion"), which depends for its full effect on the reader's not realizing the identity of the narrator until the end.
The Cretan Chronicles are an alternative, interactive version of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. The reader controls Theseus's brother Altheus, who learns from Hermes Theseus was killed by the Minotaur and takes up his brother's quest to slay the beast.
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, which is set in the distant future, contains a retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, about a student who makes a son from dreams and sends him off to fight an ogre who, unlike the minotaur, has a head like a castle and a body like a ship. In order to save a young maiden, the young man of dreams defeats the ogre by blinding him with burning tar and then returns to the island where the student lives. Sadly the student sees the sails, blackened by the burning tar, and, thinking his created son is dead, throws himself to his death, for "no man lives long when his dreams are dead." The story indicates that both mythology and language have corrupted over time, with the student creating a 'Theseus' (thesis) and the USS Monitor replacing the Minotaur.
In the 2007 video game "God of War II", Theseus is depicted as the guardian of the Fates.
