Antoine-Louis Barye, Theseus and the Minotaur. Bronze, 1840

This is how Theseus appears in ancient literature, as the slayer of monsters threatening human society. Theseus was the mythical founder-king of Athens who overcame foes identified with archaic values, considered by Athenians as their great reformer. His name shares the root of “thesmos", Greek for institution, and his political unification of Attica under Athens was represented emblematically in his journey of labours, subduing ogres and monstrous beasts. If the theory of a Minoan hegemony over the region is correct, he may derive from Athens' liberation from their political order epitomized by the bull cult, with its required annual tribute of Athenian youth shipped to Crete.

As unifying king, Theseus may have built a palace on the fortress of the Acropolis like that excavated in Mycenae (see second image in this subalbum). Pausanias reports that Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos, "Aphrodite of all the People", on the southern slope of the Acropolis. In The Frogs, Aristophanes credited him with inventing many everyday Athenian traditions. This role as defender and reformer of Greek society is exactly how Shakespeare presents him in both Dream and Kinsmen, using material from Plutarch's Life. See M. E. Lamb, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 21, No.4, Winter 1079, 478-91.Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)