AegeusAigeus

A mythical king of Athens; the son of Pandion and the consort of Aethra.

Aegeus forced his brother, Lykus (Lycus), to flee Athens and settle in southern Asia Minor. Lykus and Aegeus lived one generation before Herakles (Heracles), i.e. before 1200 BCE).

Aegeus is most noted as the father of Theseus; Aegeus left Aethra before Theseus was born and instructed her to place a sword and a pair of sandals under a boulder so that if and when Theseus was strong enough to move the boulder and remove the sword and sandals he would be manly enough to join his father in Athens and claim his royal inheritance.

When Theseus arrived in Athens as a young man bearing the sword and sandals Aegeus did not immediately recognize him; in the intervening years, Aegeus had married the sorceress, Medea, and she knew exactly who Theseus was and began devising plans to dispose of him.

Medea persuaded Aegeus to send Theseus to the plains of Marathon to capture a fierce bull that had been ravaging the countryside; Theseus successfully captured the bull and sacrificed it to Apollon.

Medea then tried to poison Theseus but Aegeus finally recognized the sword that Theseus carried and saved him from Medea’s plotting.

When Androgeus, the son of king Minos of the island of Crete, attended the first Panathenaea in Athens he attracted the ire of Aegeus by winning all the prizes; Aegeus had Androgeus killed and king Minos waged war on Athens to avenge the death of his son; peace was won only with the promise that Athens would send seven young men and seven young women every year to Minos to be slain by the ungodly bull-monster known as the Minotaur; the tradition continued until Theseus successfully killed the Minotaur.

Theseus and his father had devised a signal by which Aegeus would be able to tell, by the color of the ship’s sails, whether Theseus had defeated the Minotaur and was returning safely to Athens; Aegeus saw the ship in the distance and incorrectly interpreted the signal; thinking that Theseus was dead, he threw himself into the sea and drowned; this is perhaps the way the Aegean Sea got its name.

• Iliad, book 1, line 265
• Histories, book 1, chapter 173
• Shield of Herakles, line 182