Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

At Crommyon, on the coast between Corinth and Megara, Theseus killed a wild sow of enormous size that ravaged the countryside and was called Phaea after the old woman who reared her—or, in a rationalizing strand Plutarch records, Phaea was herself a murderous female robber nicknamed “Sow” for her ways, whom Theseus slew. Apollodorus treats the creature as a beast, offspring of Echidna and Typhon in some mythographic extensions, and names the labor among the road deeds that cleared the approach to Attica. Theseus hunted and killed the sow. The episode sits between Sinis and Sciron in the usual Isthmus sequence and gives Theseus a monster-slaying parallel to Heracles’s boar and hind—local, coastal, and briefly told, but fixed in Attic praise poetry as proof that the youth’s road was not only human bandits but a landscape of terror.