Characters
- Melanippus — son of Theseus and Perigune; ancestor claimed by the Ioxids
- Perigune — daughter of Sinis; mother of Melanippus by Theseus
- Polypemon — father of Sinis in Apollodorus (name reused for Procrustes in some traditions)
- Poseidon — alternate father of Sinis
- Sinis — Isthmus robber; bends pines to kill travelers; slain by his own method
- Theseus — kills Sinis by pine-bending; spares and lies with Perigune
Places
- Asparagus thickets — hiding place of Perigune
- Isthmus of Corinth — Sinis’s territory and place of death
Themes
Narrative
Next Theseus met Sinis, son of Polypemon (or of Poseidon), surnamed Pityocamptes—“Pine-bender”—who lived on the Isthmus of Corinth. Sinis forced travelers to help him bend down pine trees; when he suddenly released the trees, the victims were catapulted and torn apart, or dashed against the ground. Some accounts say he bent two pines outward, tied a man between them, and let the trunks spring apart to rip the body in two.
Theseus overpowered Sinis and killed him by the same pine-bending death he had inflicted on others. Sinis had a daughter, Perigune (Perigouna). She fled into the asparagus thickets and begged the plants to hide her; Theseus found her, promised safety, and lay with her. She later bore Melanippus; from that line the house of the Ioxids claimed descent, and Plutarch notes their ancestral reverence for asparagus. The episode thus joins the road-labor pattern—bandit destroyed by his own cruelty—to a local genealogical notice attaching Attic families to Theseus’s Isthmus passage.