He is raised by his mother, Aethra, and upon discovering his connection to Aegeus, travels overland to Athens, having many adventures on the way.

Pausanias reports that after synoikismos, Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite ('Aphrodite of all the People') on the southern slope of the Acropolis.

[2] As the subject of myth, the existence of Theseus as a real person has not been proven, but scholars believe that he may have been alive during the Late Bronze Age,[3] or possibly as a king in the 8th or 9th century BC.

Her cryptic words were "Do not loosen the bulging mouth of the wineskin until you have reached the height of Athens, lest you die of grief."

[5] But following the instructions of Athena in a dream, Aethra left the sleeping Aegeus and waded across to the island of Sphairia that lay close to Troezen's shore.

His mother then told him the truth about his father's identity and that he must take the sword and sandals back to the king Aegeus to claim his birthright.

To journey to Athens, Theseus could choose to go by sea (which was the safe way) or by land, following a dangerous path around the Saronic Gulf, where he would encounter a string of six entrances to the Underworld,[iii] each guarded by a chthonic enemy.

The six entrances to the underworld, more commonly known as the Six Labours, are as follows: When Theseus arrived in Athens, he did not reveal his true identity immediately.

She tried to arrange to have Theseus killed by asking him to capture the Marathonian Bull, an emblem of Cretan power.

In her honor, Theseus gave her name to one of the demes of Attica, making its inhabitants in a sense her adopted children.

[6] When Theseus appeared in the town, his reputation had preceded him, as a result of his having traveled along the notorious coastal road from Troezen and slain some of the most feared bandits there.

The eldest of these, Androgeus, set sail for Athens to take part in the Panathenaic Games, which were held there every four years.

When King Minos heard what had befallen his son, he ordered the Cretan fleet to set sail for Athens.

His retribution was to stipulate that at the end of every Great Year, which occurred after every seven cycles on the solar calendar, the seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again.

On his arrival in Crete, Ariadne, King Minos' daughter, fell in love with Theseus and, on the advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread (a clew), so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth.

As soon as Theseus entered the Labyrinth, he tied one end of the ball of string to the doorpost and brandished his sword which he had kept hidden from the guards inside his tunic.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus,[vi] for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place...[11]The ship had to be maintained in a seaworthy state, for, in return for Theseus's successful mission, the Athenians had pledged to honor Apollo every year henceforth.

To preserve the purity of the occasion, no executions were permitted between the time when the religious ceremony began to when the ship returned from Delos, which took several weeks.

They believed that Theseus had been an actual, historical figure and the ship gave them a tangible connection to their divine provenance.

Pirithous took up his arms and the pair met to do battle but were so impressed with each other's gracefulness, beauty and courage they took an oath of friendship[13] and joined the Calydonian boar hunt.

No trace of such an oral tradition, which Homer's listeners would have recognized in Nestor's allusion, survived in the literary epic.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses Theseus fights against and kills Eurytus, the "fiercest of all the fierce centaurs"[14] at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

Around him gathered the terrible band of Furies with snakes in their hair, torches, and long whips in their hands.

While these two were still in their infancy, Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, Theseus' son by the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

To ensure that she would die with dignity, Phaedra wrote to Theseus on a tablet claiming that Hippolytus had raped her before hanging herself.

The curse caused Hippolytus' horses to be frightened by a sea monster, usually a bull, and drag their rider to his death.

In 475 BC, in response to an oracle, Cimon of Athens, having conquered Skyros for the Athenians, identified as the remains of Theseus "a coffin of a great corpse with a bronze spear-head by its side and a sword."