Before he ever entered the Labyrinth or faced the Minotaur, Theseus proved himself on a road. As a young man he set out from Troezen, the small city in the north-eastern Peloponnese where he had been raised, to find his father Aegeus, king of Athens. He could have gone safely by sea. Instead he chose the land route around the Saronic Gulf, through the Isthmus of Corinth — a road notorious for its bandits and monsters. On the way he met and killed six of them, each in a manner that matched the villain’s own crimes.
These six labors of Theseus were consciously modelled on the twelve labors of Heracles, whom Theseus admired and hoped to rival. They made him the great hero of Athens, and in the late sixth century BCE, as Athens grew in power and confidence, they became a favourite subject for Athenian vase painters and sculptors.
The Sword Under the Rock
Theseus’s story begins with a test of strength. King Aegeus of Athens, childless and anxious, consulted the Delphic oracle and received a riddling answer warning him not to “loosen the wineskin’s foot” until he returned home. On his way back he stopped at Troezen, where King Pittheus understood the oracle and arranged for Aegeus to sleep with his daughter Aethra. (In some versions, the sea-god Poseidon lay with her the same night, so that Theseus had two fathers, one mortal and one divine.)
Before leaving, Aegeus placed his sword and sandals under a great rock and told Aethra that if she bore a son, and the boy grew strong enough to lift the rock, she should send him to Athens with these tokens. When Theseus was sixteen, he lifted the rock with ease, took the sword and sandals, and set out.
1. Periphetes the Club-Bearer
At Epidaurus, famous for its sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius, Theseus met Periphetes, a son of Hephaestus. Periphetes was lame but immensely strong, and he killed travellers with a great bronze club, earning the name Corynetes, “club-man.” Theseus wrested the club from him and killed him with it. He kept the club as his own weapon ever after — just as Heracles kept his own club and the skin of the Nemean lion.
2. Sinis the Pine-Bender
On the Isthmus of Corinth lived Sinis, known as Pityocamptes, the “pine-bender.” Sinis would force travellers to help him bend a pine tree down to the ground — then let go, so that the tree sprang up and hurled them through the air. In a still more gruesome version, he bent two pine trees down, tied a victim to both, and released them, tearing the person apart.
Theseus killed Sinis in the same way. Sinis’s daughter Perigune hid among the wild asparagus and prayed to the plants to save her; Theseus coaxed her out, and she later bore him a son. Her descendants, it was said, never burned or cut asparagus out of reverence.
3. The Crommyonian Sow
At Crommyon, near Corinth, a monstrous wild sow named Phaea was ravaging the countryside and killing farmers. Some said she was a daughter of Typhon and Echidna, the parents of many monsters; others that “Phaea” was really a woman bandit so savage that she was called a sow. Theseus hunted her down and killed her. The episode parallels Heracles’s capture of the Erymanthian Boar — though Theseus, pointedly, kills rather than captures.
4. Sciron and the Turtle
Along the coastal cliffs of the Megarid, where the road ran along a narrow ledge above the sea, lived Sciron. He would force travellers to wash his feet. As they knelt, he kicked them over the cliff into the sea, where a giant man-eating turtle waited below to devour them.
Theseus agreed to wash Sciron’s feet — and then seized him by the legs and hurled him over the cliff to the turtle. The Scironian Rocks kept the bandit’s name into historical times. (The people of Megara, naturally, told a different story, in which Sciron was a respectable local hero.)
5. Cercyon the Wrestler
At Eleusis, the city of Demeter’s great mysteries, King Cercyon challenged every passer-by to a wrestling match and killed them when he won. Theseus accepted the challenge. He defeated Cercyon not through strength alone but through skill: later Athenians credited Theseus with inventing the art of wrestling, using technique rather than brute force. He lifted Cercyon high and dashed him to the ground. Theseus then became ruler of Eleusis — a mythical justification for its later incorporation into the Athenian state.
6. Procrustes and His Bed
The most famous of all was the last. Near Eleusis, on the road to Athens, lived Procrustes (“the stretcher”), also called Damastes or Polypemon. He offered travellers a night’s rest in his house. He had a bed — or in some versions two beds, one long and one short — and he made every guest fit it exactly. If the guest was too short, he stretched them with hammers or on a rack; if too tall, he cut off their feet or legs.
Theseus made Procrustes lie on his own bed and dealt with him the same way.
The phrase “Procrustean bed” has entered many languages to describe any rigid standard to which things are forced to conform, regardless of their natural shape. It is used of bureaucracy, of scientific theories that distort their evidence, and of ideologies that cut down anything that does not fit.
The Logic of Punishment
The labors share a pattern: each villain is punished by his own method. Periphetes dies by his club, Sinis by his pine trees, Sciron by his cliff, Cercyon by his wrestling, and Procrustes by his bed. The Greeks had a word for this kind of justice, and they saw in Theseus a hero who brought order to lawless places by turning the lawless against themselves.
The labors also have a political dimension. The road Theseus cleared linked the Peloponnese to Athens, passing through Megara and Eleusis — territories whose control Athens disputed or had recently gained. By making Theseus the tamer of that road, the Athenians claimed the whole route as their hero’s achievement.
Arrival in Athens
When Theseus reached Athens, he was nearly killed before he could reveal who he was. His father Aegeus had married the sorceress Medea, who had fled Corinth after murdering her children (see Jason and Medea). Medea recognized the young stranger as Aegeus’s heir and persuaded the king, who did not recognize him, to poison the dangerous newcomer at a banquet.
At the feast, Theseus drew his sword to cut his meat. Aegeus recognized the sword he had left under the rock, and dashed the poisoned cup from his son’s hands. Medea fled Athens. Theseus was acknowledged as heir to the throne.
Soon afterward he faced the Marathonian Bull — the same bull that Heracles had brought from Crete — and captured it alive, sacrificing it to Apollo. Then came the greatest test of all: the voyage to Crete and the Labyrinth, told in Theseus and the Minotaur.
In Art and Monument
The labors of Theseus were shown on the metopes of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (c. 500 BCE) alongside those of Heracles, and on the temple of Hephaestus in the Athenian Agora, long known as the Theseion. Athenian red-figure cups often depict several labors around a single vessel, arranged like a cycle, with the Minotaur at the centre. These images, made in the years when Athens was becoming a democracy, presented Theseus as a hero of civic order — a clearer of roads, a punisher of tyrants, and a unifier of Attica.
Last reviewed: September 2026.