Aegeus

Apollodorus names Aegeus as one of four sons born to Pandion in exile at Megara, with Pallas, Nisus and Lycus. After Pandion died, the brothers drove the Metionids out of Athens and split the rule four ways, but Aegeus held the real power. He married twice, first Meta and then Chalciope, and had no child by either. Fearing his brothers, he went to consult the oracle at Delphi about children. The answer came as a riddle: he was not to loosen the mouth of the wineskin until he reached the height of Athens.

Puzzled, Aegeus travelled home by way of Troezen and told the oracle to its king, Pittheus. Apollodorus says Pittheus understood it, made Aegeus drunk and put him to bed with his daughter Aethra. Plutarch is less sure whether Pittheus persuaded him or tricked him. Before leaving, Aegeus hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock. If Aethra bore a son strong enough to lift it, she was to send him to Athens with the tokens. Plutarch adds that the journey was to be secret, because the fifty sons of Pallas despised the childless king and plotted against him.

Back in Athens, Aegeus held the Panathenaic games, where Minos's son Androgeus beat every opponent. Apollodorus says Aegeus then sent Androgeus against the bull of Marathon, which killed him. The same account offers a second version, in which jealous rivals ambushed Androgeus on the road to Thebes. Either way, Minos made war on Athens. Famine and plague followed, and an oracle told the Athenians to give Minos whatever satisfaction he chose. He demanded seven youths and seven maidens as food for the Minotaur.

Years later, Theseus arrived in Athens carrying the tokens from the rock. By then Aegeus had married Medea, who recognised the stranger before her husband did. Apollodorus says she persuaded Aegeus to send the young man against the Marathonian bull, the Cretan Bull that Apollodorus elsewhere has roaming to Marathon after Heracles set it free. When Theseus survived, she gave Aegeus poison for him. Plutarch places the scene at a banquet: Theseus drew his sword as if to carve the meat, Aegeus knew it, and dashed the cup to the ground. He acknowledged his son before the citizens and drove Medea out.

When Theseus sailed with the third tribute, Aegeus told him to hoist white sails on the return if he lived, in place of the ship's black one. The voyage is told in full in Theseus and the Minotaur. Theseus killed the Minotaur, but on the way home, grieving for Ariadne in Apollodorus's telling, he forgot the signal. Aegeus saw the black sail from the Acropolis, took his son for dead, and threw himself down. Theseus succeeded him as king.

Where Aegeus fell is the sharpest disagreement about him. Apollodorus says he watched from the Acropolis and cast himself down. Pausanias, standing by the temple of Wingless Victory at the Acropolis gateway, reports the legend that Aegeus leapt from that very spot, from which the sea is visible. Plutarch says only that he threw himself from the rock. Catullus has him climb the citadel to watch and fling himself headlong from the height. Hyginus is the one who puts him into the sea itself, and says the Aegean was named after him. The popular explanation of the sea's name therefore rests on Hyginus, not on the older Greek accounts.

Even his fatherhood was contested. Apollodorus records that Poseidon lay with Aethra on the same night as Aegeus, and Hyginus says Poseidon yielded the child to Aegeus. His own descent was questioned too. Apollodorus notes a version in which Aegeus was really the son of one Scyrius, passed off by Pandion as his own. In Plutarch, the sons of Pallas call him only an adopted son of Pandion, with no blood tie to the old royal line of Erechtheus.

Euripides gives Aegeus his best-known scene outside the Theseus story. In the Medea, he passes through Corinth on his way home from Delphi and hears how Jason has abandoned Medea and Creon is banishing her. She promises to end his childlessness with her drugs. He agrees to shelter her if she reaches Athens on her own, and swears by Earth, the Sun and all the gods never to give her up. The oath secures her a refuge before she takes her revenge in Corinth.

Athens honoured him all the same. Pausanias lists Aegeus among the eponymous heroes whose statues stood in the city, and mentions a hero-shrine of Aegeus. Plutarch says the poison spilled where the Delphinium enclosure later stood, on the site of Aegeus's house. Plutarch also preserves a variant from the poet Simonides, in which the agreed signal of safety was not a white sail but a scarlet one.