King Lykomedes, standing at my shoulder, said, “He was off somewhere, when your ship came in. He will think this the great day of his life, when he learns who is here. Whenever, for his father’s sake, I try to keep him back from some reckless dare or other, he always tells me ‘Theseus would have done it.’ That is his touchstone for a man.”
He beckoned up his servant, saying, “Go tell Prince Achilles to wash and put on his best, and come up here.”
I said it had been a long day and a rough crossing, and I would rather see the boy tomorrow. He called the man back and said no more of it, but led me to my room. It is near the crest of the crag; for the palace is built into it like a swallow’s nest. In the glow of the sunken sun one could see all over the island, and, beyond, great sweeps of sea.
“In clear weather,” he said, “one sees Euboia. Yes, that point of light must be a watch-fire there. But you are used to an eagle’s perch; I think your rock is higher?”
“No,” I answered. “Yours has a hill below it, and mine a plain. This stands higher by far. But if you take cliff for cliff, just the sheer drop, I daresay there is not much in it.”
“If my house speaks of home to you,” he said, “so use it, and I am content.”
I lay down, being tired, and sent off my servants. I was thinking, before I fell asleep, of the flashing light-footed boy, awaiting tomorrow. It would be good to spare him that. Let him keep this Theseus who speaks for the god within him. Why change a god for a lame old man with a twisted mouth? I could warn him of what he is; but it would not alter him. Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them.
So I was thinking, when weariness closed my eyes. I slept; and I dreamed of Marathon.
It seemed I was wakened by a great din of battle. I leaped from my naked bed; I was in old Hekaline’s cottage, young again, with my arms beside me. I snatched them and ran outside. The sun shone brightly; beached along the strand was a great fleet of warships, full of outlandish warriors scrambling ashore. They were too many for pirates; it was war, and a great one; for all the men of Athens were there, drawn up to defend their fields. As one finds in dreams, there was something quaint about them; they had helms of bronze, with curving crests like the hoopoe’s, and little round shields painted with beasts and birds. But I knew them for my people; and few enough they looked, facing that horde, as we were when the Scythians came. I thought of the City, the women and children waiting; and I forgot I had ever suffered wrong from Athens. Once more I was the King.
It was all foot-fighting; I don’t know where the chariots were. Just then some chief started the paean, and they gave the war-yell, charging at a run. I thought, “They know I am with them! Marathon always brought me luck, and I am the luck of Marathon.” My feet were light as I raced up through the press into the vanguard; and when I reached the line of the barbarians, in my hands was the sacred ax of Crete, that I used to kill the Minotaur. I swung it about my head; the outlanders gave backward; then the men of Athens knew me, and started to cry my name. The enemy were on the run for their ships, clambering and falling and drowning; it was victory, clear and sure. We gave a great yell of triumph; and my own noise woke me. I was lying with the moon upon my face, by the window that looked down at the crags of Skyros. Sound travels far on a quiet night; even so high, I heard the sound of the sea.
The dream is gone; why has it left no grief of loss behind it? Hope comes in these waves, like water filling a dried-up pool. Here from the window, I see the sea smooth as a mirror spread with moonlight; yet the sound grows. Is it true, then, as Oedipus said to me at Kolonos, that the power returns? The gods sent me as a guide to him; have they sent Lykomedes now to me? If my house speaks of home to you, so use it.”
Yes; it is rising. Not high and exultant, as it was upon the Pnyx; but steady, sure and strong. Bitterness scours away in it. I will not offer my death to strangers, like Oedipus of Thebes. Let Father Poseidon have it, to keep against my people’s need. There will be a time, as my dream foretold. In the dream they had no king with them; maybe he would not make the offering. They knew me, and cried my name. Some harper had brought it down to them. While the bard sings and the child remembers, I shall not perish from off the Rock.
This balcony clings to the living cliff. I see a walk beyond it, threading the crag. That will do well. If I go from here, it might be said that Lykomedes murdered me. It would be discourteous to shame my host. But there is only Akamas left to ask my blood-price; and he, though he is half Cretan, knows well enough how the Erechthids die.
Surely goats made this track. That boy, Achilles, might scramble here for a dare. No place, this, for a dragging foot; but all the better. It will seem like mischance, except to those who know.
The tide comes in. A swelling sea, calm, strong and shining. To swim under the moon, onward and onward, plunging with the dolphins, singing … To leap with the wind in my hair …
Author’s Note
and
The Legend of Theseus
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.