While Theseus was there, Pirithous decided to marry a local girl named Hippodamia. I don’t know why you would name your kid Hippo-anything, but allegedly she was beautiful. For the wedding, Pirithous invited all the neighbouring tribes, including the centaurs. Unfortunately, the centaurs got drunk and tried to kidnap the bride. Even among the Lapiths, that was rude. The wedding turned into a war. Pirithous and Theseus led the Lapiths against the Party Ponies and kicked their horsey behinds.
Theseus considered this one of his greatest victories. But it didn’t do much for his reputation at home when he brought an army of rowdy Lapiths back to Athens and had a drunken, violent victory party at the Acropolis. The place was littered with severed centaur heads and party streamers for weeks.
Then Pirithous got a really bad idea. He decided he and Theseus should get new wives together.
‘We’re the best warriors in the world!’ Pirithous threw his arm around his friend. ‘We should – hic! – we should totally marry daughters of Zeus.’
As usual, Theseus didn’t bother thinking this through. It was a shiny idea, and he jumped at it. ‘Yeah, cool. But who and how?’
‘Whoever, man! And we’ll just kidnap them!’
‘Awesome.’
‘I’ll help you snag a wife. Then you help me. Who do you want?’
Theseus chose the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen – a daughter of Zeus named Helen. (As in Helen of Troy.) She was still too young to get married, but Theseus figured they would kidnap her and wait for her to get older. Disgusting and wrong? You bet. I did mention Pirithous was a bad influence, right?
They had no trouble kidnapping Helen. Theseus brought her to Troezen, where his mom, Aethra, was now the queen. He asked her to keep Helen on ice for a few years until she was of marrying age.
I have a feeling Aethra didn’t think much of that idea, because later Helen got away from Troezen and grew up to marry someone else, but that’s a whole other story.
Then Pirithous decided it was his turn to pick a wife. ‘I know just the lady! Persephone!’
Theseus scowled. ‘You mean, like … the Queen of the Underworld?’
‘Yeah! We’ll go to the Underworld and grab her. It’ll be awesome!’
Like a numbskull, Theseus went along with it. They found an entrance to Hades’s realm and battled their way into the Underworld, killing monsters and scaring ghosts. They intimidated Charon the ferryman into taking them across the River Styx.
They were almost to the palace of Hades when they got tired and decided to sit down for a few minutes on a couple of rocks. Theseus’s eyes got heavy. He began to doze off. Then he realized taking a nap in the Underworld probably wasn’t a good idea. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t move. His arms were frozen.
‘Pirithous!’ he cried. ‘Help!’
He glanced over. His friend had turned entirely to stone. Hovering over Pirithous were three ugly bat-winged ladies with fiery whips – the Furies themselves.
‘Serves you right for trying to kidnap our queen!’ one of them hissed. ‘Tourists!’
The Furies flew away, leaving Theseus frozen and helpless. He stayed there for months, with no company except ghosts, until finally another hero came by on a different quest and set him free.
That guy’s name was Hercules. We’ll get to him later on, after I’ve had my vitamins and fuelled up on pizza, because that dude did, like, everything.
Theseus finally got home to Athens, but he was never the same.
The people of Athens didn’t love him any more. They were tired of his carousing and acting like a jerk. His estranged wife, Phaedra, had fallen in love with Theseus’s own son, Hippolytus, who was now all grown up and ready to become king – which gets us into a whole telenovela level of weirdness.
When Theseus found out, he lost his cool. He killed his own son, which is a big bad smite-from-the-gods no-no. At that point he figured he’d better leave Athens permanently, before the locals lynched him.
Scorned and reviled, he travelled to the nearby island of Skyros, but the folks there didn’t like him, either. The local king, Lycomedes, took Theseus into custody, and the townspeople literally voted him off the island. They dragged him to the top of the cliff and tossed him off. This time, Poseidon didn’t save Theseus when he hit the bottom.
After Theseus died, his reputation was dirt for a whole generation. Only later did people forget the bad stuff he’d done and start concentrating on the heroic deeds of his youth.
Me, I think Theseus got what he deserved, right in line with his own philosophy. Things started to go badly for him when he lost interest in Ariadne and dumped her. Eventually Athens lost interest in him and dumped him. You don’t mess with karma.
Does his story have a moral? If it does, I have a sinking feeling it would apply to me. Being impulsive and hyper-attentive can be really helpful. ADHD can keep you alive. It can even make you a hero.
On the other hand, if you lose sight of the important things, if you get reckless and stupid and allow yourself to get distracted when you’re on the verge of learning an important lesson –
OOH, A CHIPMUNK!
Atalanta vs. Three Pieces of Fruit: The Ultimate Death Match
For years I thought this lady was the capital of Georgia.
Then I figured out Atalanta and Atlanta were two separate words, and I wondered if maybe Atalanta was named after Atlanta because she really liked the Braves or Coca-Cola.
But nope.
Turns out the name Atalanta in Ancient Greek means equal in weight.
Makes sense. Atalanta was equal to any male hero. Actually, she was stronger and faster than most of them, but Greek men wouldn’t have dubbed a woman Better Than Us. That would’ve hurt their pride. The best compliment they were willing to pay was As Good as a Dude.
Atalanta’s parents didn’t give her that name. They hated her from the moment she was born.
Her father, Iasus (pronounced Yay Sauce), was the king of Arcadia. Like a lot of Greek kings, he was obsessed with having sons to carry on the family name. Maybe with a name like King Yay Sauce he was touchy about not appearing macho enough. When his first child turned out to be a girl, he was so upset that he pulled a reverse Amazon. He took the newborn baby out into the wilderness and left her on a rock to die.
He did not win the award that year for World’s Best Dad.
The little baby cried and screamed. I would too, if my dad threw me away. She had a strong pair of lungs, so it wasn’t long before a huge she-bear lumbered out of the woods to see what the fuss was about.
That could have ended badly for the baby and deliciously for the bear.
Fortunately, this bear was a grieving mother. Her own cubs had just been killed by hunters. She found Atalanta mewling and squirming on the rock, and Mama Bear decided to raise the baby as her own. She carefully picked up Atalanta in her huge mouth and returned to her cave, where she suckled the child on yummy bear milk.
For her first few years, Atalanta grew up thinking she was a bear. She was healthy and strong. She learned to fear nothing except human hunters. At night, she snuggled into her mother’s thick fur. During the day, she ate honey and rummaged through Dumpsters, or whatever bears did in Ancient Greece.
Life was great … until hunters came back to the area. One afternoon, while Mama Bear was out foraging, two guys crept into the cave, hoping to find some bear cubs they could kill for fur, or maybe capture and sell to a travelling circus. Instead, they found a human child napping on a bed of animal pelts.
‘Dude, that’s not right,’ said the first hunter.
‘We should get this kid out of here,’ said the second hunter.
Their voices woke Atalanta. She snarled and bared her teeth.
‘It’s okay, girl,’ said the first hunter. ‘We’ll rescue you.’
Atalanta did not want to be rescued. She clawed at the hunters’ eyes and kicked them in the crotch, but the men were bigger and stronger. They kidnapped her and took her back to
their village, which must have broken Mama Bear’s heart. For the second time, humans had raided her home and family. She really needed a better security system.
The villagers did their best to raise Atalanta as a human. They taught her how to speak, wear clothes and eat with a fork. They discouraged her from mauling people and hibernating during the winter.
Atalanta adapted, but she never lost her wild edge. She preferred wearing fur pelts to dresses. Her fierce stare could make the most seasoned warrior back down. By the time she was fourteen, she could shoot a bow and wield a knife better than anyone in the village. She could outrun the fastest horse.
She grew taller and stronger than any woman the villagers had ever seen. With her bronze skin and her long blonde hair (a rarity in Greece), she was both gorgeous and terrifying. The villagers began calling her Atalanta, equal in weight, because no man could dominate her. Any who tried ended up dead.
It probably won’t surprise you that her favourite goddess was Artemis, the virgin huntress. Atalanta never became an actual follower of Artemis, but she admired everything about the goddess: her self-confidence, her skill at hunting, the way she killed any man who even looked at her funny.
When she was sixteen, Atalanta wore out her welcome among the villagers. They started talking about marriage prospects for her, and Atalanta figured she’d better leave before she hurt somebody.
She moved back to the wilderness, where she could live like Artemis, without the company of annoying men. Atalanta never found her Mama Bear again, but she did find a cave that reminded her of home. It was halfway up a mountain, where a cold stream burst from the rocks and provided unlimited running water. Curtains of ivy covered the cave entrance, giving her privacy. The view from her front porch was pretty spectacular: a valley filled with wildflowers, forests of oaks and pines and no other humans in sight.
Her only neighbours were centaurs, who knew better than to bother her.
Well … mostly. One time, two young stallion bros named Rhoikos and Hylaios got drunk and decided it would be a super idea to capture Atalanta and force her to marry them.
Two centaurs. One Atalanta. Which of them would get to marry her? They hadn’t planned that far ahead. They were drunk. They were centaurs. They didn’t need no stinking plan.
They painted their faces red, wreathed their heads in grapevines and put on their grungiest tie-dyed Phish concert T-shirts. Usually that was enough to scare even the toughest humans. That afternoon, while Atalanta was out hunting, the centaurs hid in the trees near her cave, hoping to ambush her when she came home.
Atalanta came along with her bow and quiver, a deer carcass slung over her shoulder. The two centaurs burst out of the woods, screaming and waving their spears.
‘Marry me or die!’ Rhoikos yelled.
He expected Atalanta to collapse in a puddle of tears. Instead, she dropped her deer carcass, calmly nocked an arrow and shot Rhoikos through the centre of his forehead. The centaur toppled over dead.
Hylaios roared in outrage. ‘How dare you kill my friend?’
‘Back off,’ Atalanta warned, ‘or you’re next.’
‘I will have you for my wife!’
‘Yeah … that’s not happening.’
Hylaios levelled his spear and charged. Atalanta shot him through the heart.
She dipped an arrow in centaur blood and wrote across their dead withers: NO MEANS NO. Then she left them to rot.
After that, the other centaurs gave her lots of space.
Atalanta would have been happy spending the rest of her life alone in those woods – eating nuts and berries, weaving baskets and hanging out with cute woodland critters, then tracking them down and killing them.
Unfortunately, her reputation began to spread. The centaurs gossiped. So did the villagers and occasional hunters who happened through her territory. They spoke of a wild blonde woman who ran faster than the wind and fired a bow with deadly accuracy. Some wondered if she was Artemis in human form.
Eventually, a guy sought out Atalanta – not for marriage, but for help with a giant feral hog.
So, if you read that other book I wrote about the Greek gods, you might recall a cute little monster called the Kalydonian Boar, aka the Death Pig. Artemis unleashed this fifty-ton tank of angry pork on the kingdom of Kalydon because the king was a doofus and forgot to sacrifice to her.
Anyway, here’s part of the story I didn’t tell you.
The king’s son, Prince Meleager, was the one who organized the kingdom’s defences. He decided to host a pig hunt with all the best warriors in Greece.
Meleager was an interesting guy. When he was born, the Fates appeared to his mom and prophesied that he would live only as long as a particular piece of wood in the fireplace remained unburned. If that seems random, it’s because it is. The Fates must have had a sense of humour. They loved playing practical jokes on mortals, like Oh, my gods! Let’s tell her that her son’s life depends on a piece of wood. That’ll be hilarious!
Anyway, Meleager’s mom snatched the wood out of the fireplace and kept it safe in a box. Because of that, Meleager grew up believing he was pretty much invincible. As long as the firewood was safe, he was safe. When the time came to hunt the Kalydonian Boar, Meleager wasn’t afraid. The only way that pig could kill him was if it charged into the palace, found his mother’s room, broke open her lockbox, took the magical firewood and learned to use matches. Wild boars weren’t known for such behaviour.
But Meleager couldn’t kill the monster on his own. Nor did he trust the skills of the others who had joined his celebrity pig hunt. That’s why he decided to recruit Atalanta.
By this time, her legend had spread throughout Greece. Meleager was dying to meet her. He loved hunting. He loved beautiful women. A beautiful woman who was the best hunter in the world? That was too interesting not to check out.
For weeks he searched the wilderness until he met a centaur who gave him directions to Atalanta’s cave.
‘Just don’t tell her I sent you,’ the centaur pleaded. ‘That lady is crazy!’
Meleager approached the base of the cliffs. He set down his weapons, then peered up at the curtains of ivy covering the cave entrance.
‘Hello, Atalanta?’
The ivy rustled. A voice called down, ‘There is no one here by that name.’
‘Look, I just want to talk. My name is Meleager.’
The ivy parted. Atalanta stood on the ledge, her bow aimed at Meleager’s head. With her flowing blonde hair, her fierce eyes, and her dress of animal pelts, she was even more beautiful than Meleager had imagined. Not many people can pull off the dead-animal look, but Atalanta totally rocked it.
‘Go away,’ she warned. ‘Otherwise I’ll shoot you in the face. I’m tired of men coming here asking to marry me.’
‘I’m not here to marry you,’ Meleager said, though his heart was pounding. His brain screamed, Marry her! Marry her!
He explained about the Kalydonian Boar and his pig-hunting party.
‘We could really use your help,’ he said. ‘The hunter who brings down the boar will win riches and fame.’
‘I don’t care about riches,’ Atalanta said. ‘There’s nothing to buy out here in the wilderness. I already have everything I need: shelter, clean water, food, pelts.’
‘How about fame?’ Meleager asked. ‘This boar is a curse from Artemis. Only someone who has the blessing of the goddess could possibly kill it. If you bring down the monster, you’ll prove yourself the world’s greatest hunter, favoured by Artemis. Your name will live forever. You’ll also make the male hunters in the group look like incompetent fools.’
Atalanta lowered her bow. She had no use for this prince, or his money, or his promises of fame. But making male hunters look like fools … that was tempting.
‘If I join this hunt,’ she said, ‘I will tolerate no flirting from you. No attempts to marry me. If anyone else in your group makes a pass at me, I will most likely kill him.’
‘Seems …
fair,’ Meleager said, though he was secretly hoping she would warm up to him. ‘Welcome aboard!’
He led Atalanta back to his kingdom, sending messengers out ahead of him with the warning ATALANTA IS COMING. DO NOT FLIRT WITH THE TALENT. SHE WILL PUT AN ARROW THROUGH YOUR HEAD.
By the time they reached the palace, dozens of famous hunters had gathered: Ankaios, Mopsos, Kepheus … all the biggest, most unpronounceable names in hunting!
They’d got the warning about Atalanta, and they weren’t exactly thrilled to see her. A beautiful woman they couldn’t possess, who claimed to be better than they were at their chosen profession? Forget about it!
‘You expect me to hunt with this woman?’ Kepheus said. ‘I am offended! I won’t lower myself to such a contest!’
‘Neither will I!’ said Mopsos.
Atalanta snarled. ‘Go home, then, all of you. At least I won’t have to deal with your stench.’
The men reached for their knives.
‘Guys!’ Meleager pleaded. ‘We have to work as a team. We need Atalanta’s skills.’
‘Ridiculous,’ said Ankaios. ‘I don’t need any woman’s help. I will single-handedly slay the boar!’
‘Let’s make a deal,’ said Meleager. ‘We hunt the boar together. No killing each other. No complaining about girl cooties. You’ll all share the reward money and the glory. Whoever draws first blood from the beast will get a special prize. He – or she – will get to keep the monster’s hide. That will decide who is the best hunter.’
I’m not sure why anyone would want a smelly giant boar’s hide, but the hunters’ eyes lit up with excitement. They all agreed to Meleager’s terms.
The next day, they set out to find the boar. As they travelled, the other hunters gave Atalanta the cold shoulder, so she ate most of her meals with Prince Meleager. He tried very hard not to flirt with her. He asked about her early days. He sought her advice on the best ways to track and trap. Despite herself, Atalanta began to warm to the man. She’d never been around someone who was almost … well, respectful.