Theseus had two fathers, a king and a sea god, in one night
Greek myth gave Theseus a double birth. His mother Aethra slept with Aegeus, king of Athens, then waded to a small island and was possessed by Poseidon the same night. That mixed parentage, half mortal and half divine, set up the hero who would kill the Minotaur and unite Attica.
Aegeus, childless, had asked the Delphic oracle for help and received a riddle about not opening a wineskin before reaching home. His host Pittheus of Troezen grasped its meaning, got him drunk and gave him his daughter. Before returning to Athens, Aegeus hid a sword and sandals under a huge rock, telling Aethra that their son could claim his birthright once he was strong enough to lift it. The grown Theseus did exactly that.
Rather than sail, he took the dangerous coast road around the Saronic Gulf, meeting six murderous bandits and turning each one's cruelty back on him. Procrustes, who forced travellers to fit his beds, is the best remembered. In Athens, the king's consort Medea recognised the newcomer and tried first to have him killed by the Marathonian Bull, then to poison him; Aegeus spotted the sword at the last moment and knocked the cup away.
Crete then demanded its grim tribute. After Athenians killed Androgeus, son of King Minos, Athens had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete, in one version to be eaten by the Minotaur in Daedalus's Labyrinth. Theseus volunteered, promising his father a white sail if he survived. Minos's daughter Ariadne, advised by Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread to retrace his steps. He killed the beast and escaped with her, but abandoned her on Naxos, where the god Dionysus later married her.
Afterwards he was credited with the synoikismos, uniting the towns of Attica under Athens, and with building a palace on the Acropolis. Plutarch wrote his life as a deliberate parallel to Romulus, founder of Rome, drawing on older writers whose works are partly lost, and noted that his ship was preserved in the harbour for centuries. Whether Theseus was real is unproven; some scholars place a possible historical king in the Late Bronze Age or the 8th or 9th century BC.
Source: Theseus
