Aegeus

Aegeus was born to Pandion, the king of Athens, and his wife. Pandion had been driven from his throne by the sons of Metion, a rival house, and had taken refuge in Megara, a city on the Isthmus of Corinth. Aegeus and his brothers - Pallas, Nisus, Lycus, and possibly others - eventually returned to Athens and reclaimed the kingdom. Aegeus became king, but his reign was troubled by the lack of an heir. He married first, but had no children, and his second marriage also produced no sons. The throne of Athens was contested by the sons of Pallas, his nephews, who claimed the right to rule if Aegeus died without issue. The pressure of succession drove Aegeus to seek the counsel of the gods. He travelled to Delphi, the most sacred oracle in Greece, where the priestess of Apollo, the Pythia, sat on a tripod and spoke the words of the god. The oracle gave him a riddle: he must not loosen the wine-skin's foot, meaning the mouth of a wineskin, until he reached the highest point of Athens. Aegeus did not understand the meaning, and on his way home he stopped at Troezen, a small town on the northeastern coast of the Peloponnese, the large peninsula of southern Greece. There he was received by King Pittheus, a wise man who understood the oracle's true meaning. Pittheus arranged for his daughter Aethra to lie with Aegeus, and the king of Athens fathered a son. Before departing, Aegeus placed his sword and a pair of sandals beneath a great stone and told Aethra that when their son grew strong enough to lift the stone, he should take the tokens and come to Athens. Some say that on the same night, the sea god Poseidon also lay with Aethra, making Theseus a child of both mortal and divine blood. Years passed, and Aegeus remained childless in the eyes of his court. He took into his household Medea, the sorceress of Colchis who had fled Corinth after murdering her own children and King Creon with a poisoned robe. Medea promised Aegeus that she could use her drugs and magic to produce a son for him, and she became his consort. But when Theseus, now grown strong and famous for clearing the road to Athens of murderers and monsters, arrived in the city, Medea recognised him as a threat. She persuaded Aegeus that the young stranger was dangerous and convinced him to serve Theseus a cup of poison at a banquet. Aegeus, watching the young man, noticed the sword he carried and recognised it as the one he had hidden beneath the stone at Troezen. In that instant he knew this was his son. He knocked the poisoned cup from Theseus's hand, embraced him, and drove Medea from Athens. The sorceress fled on a chariot drawn by winged serpents, and Theseus was proclaimed the heir to the throne. The reunion was brief. Soon after, the third tribute of Athenian youths and maidens was due to be sent to Crete, where King Minos demanded seven young men and seven young women every nine years to be cast into the Labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Theseus volunteered to go as one of the victims, but his true purpose was to kill the beast and end the tribute. Before departing, he promised his father that if he survived, he would change the ship's black sails to white as a signal of victory. Aegeus watched the ship depart from the harbour of Athens, and then he went to Cape Sounion, the southernmost point of Attica, where he could see the horizon and wait for the return. The ship reached Crete, and Theseus entered the Labyrinth with the thread given by Ariadne, the princess daughter of Minos, killed the Minotaur, and fled with the other youths. But in the joy of victory or the confusion of departure, he forgot his promise. The ship approached Athens with its black sails still raised. Aegeus, watching from the clifftop at Cape Sounion, saw the dark sails and believed his son dead. He threw himself into the sea below, and the waters were named the Aegean Sea in his memory. Theseus returned to find himself king of Athens, and he ruled well, uniting the villages of Attica and founding the Panathenaic festival. But the sea that washed against the shores of Greece would forever bear the name of the father who loved his son too much to survive his loss.