American Journal of Philology

Interest in Theseus continues to run high; this decade alone has seen the publication of three books devoted to the hero and his meaning for Athens: Claude Calame's Thésée et l'imaginaire athénien (Lausanne 1990), Henry Walker's Theseus and Athens (New York 1995), and now Sophie Mills's revision of her 1992 Oxford dissertation. Calame's brilliant study is in a different category from those of Mills and Walker, since his central focus is the relation of myth and cult, for which Theseus provides a rich and complex example. Walker and Mills are much closer in aim and scope, but their intellectual styles are different, as are many of their conclusions. Walker probes the sources for signs of internal tensions and contradictions, and finds them. Mills looks for ideologically consistent elements, and finds them. Both approaches have value. Mills footnotes particular items of convergence or disagreement with Walker but does not attempt a full-scale confrontation of views, which is no doubt just as well.

Mills's first two chapters canvass a wide range of evidence for the myth of Theseus and its meanings. "Images of Theseus before Tragedy" is devoted to showing how Athenian or Athenian-inspired sources of the Late Archaic period take the often unpromising material found in the oldest strata of the legend and transform it to produce a national hero, that is, a figure who embodies "the best qualities of the nation in its own eyes" and can be recreated as the idealized image of Athens changes, "so as to present consistently an ideal standard of conduct" (25). "The Athenian Image of Athens" surveys the ideal of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, arguing that a consistent image (essentially that of the surviving epitaphioi logoi) can be found in nearly every relevant source. For Mills, the funeral encomia present in exaggerated form an ideology that "pervades mainstream Athenian thought about Athens and Athenian identity" (52). She argues that Thucydides stands outside the mainstream; his "cynicism and desire to expose the falsehood of popular ideology should . . . not be used as an indication of what the average Athenian generally felt about the empire" (85).

The ideal Athens is portrayed in the "mainstream" tradition, with only changes of emphasis over time, as a civilizing force, whose military strength and cultural superiority go hand in hand. Stories and imagery combine to present Athens as "the only truly Greek city" (59) in its courage and daring, its steadfast pursuit of justice, and its generosity in dealing with others, and thus support the claim that Athenians are not merely superior to barbarians (as are all [End Page 149] Greeks) but different from and better than other Greeks. And if Athens is a super-Greek city, "Theseus, as its representative in tragedy, is a kind of super-Greek" (60). All of this is to some degree a useful corrective to the emphasis on discomfort and equivocation in many recent studies of Athenian ideology. One may not be entirely convinced (I shall express some of my own reservations below), but the case is made intelligently, using a wide array of ancient sources and relevant modern scholarship.

The heart of the book is a sequence of three chapters devoted to Mills's analysis of three tragedies (Euripides' Suppliants and Heracles and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus) in which Theseus appears in his role of Athenian king and embodiment of the Athenian ideal. Given the views I have just outlined, there is little that surprises in these interpretations and, indeed, little that could be called new, but no one else has made the case that Theseus embodies a coherent image of the ideal Athens with such thoroughness or argued for its significance with such cogency. Discussing Heracles, Mills is careful to recognize that Theseus and Athens can only go so far in alleviating the suffering that seems to be an inevitable part of human...