Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Theseus came of age, Aethra led him to the rock Aegeus had marked, told him of his father’s tokens, and urged him to take ship for Athens—the safer route. Theseus lifted the stone with ease, recovered the sword and sandals, and refused the sea passage. He wished to rival Heracles, whose fame filled Greece, and to prove himself by clearing the road that ran from Trozen through the Isthmus to Athens—a path choked with robbers and wild beasts whom travelers feared more than the waves. Aethra and Pittheus pleaded; Theseus held to the land journey. Armed with Aegeus’s sword and wearing the sandals that would later identify him in Athens, he set out along the Saronic coast and the Isthmus. The choice frames the whole cycle of his road labors: each bandit he meets is an answer to Heracles’s monster-slaying, scaled to the human and local violence of the Corinthian and Megarian borders. Apollodorus and Plutarch agree on the sequence that follows—Periphetes, Sinis, the Crommyonian sow, Sciron, Cercyon, Procrustes—though Plutarch, compiling variant biographies, sometimes softens or moralizes motives. The classical narrative core remains: the youth deliberately turns from safe sea to dangerous road so that arrival at Athens will be a conquest of the path itself.