Greek Gods and Demigods tend to be quite cruel and callous.
But also, people in the past were generally very religious. They believed their stuff. Not necessarily the tales, but the general characterisation. Particularly if the powerful gods are “known” to be vindictive and vain, you probably don’t want to offend them by dismissing their commands.
The whole origin of these superstitions was the desire to appease whatever anthropomorphised force was giving them trouble (weather, crop growth etc.), enticing it to treat them well and eventually expanded to trying to influence other things beyond (individual) human power (love, arts). If you genuinely believe that an angry god could make your life hell, it makes sense you would avoid angering them.
Not that this makes Theseus less of a dick. It’s an indictment of their dickish religion as an extension of human dickery, and particularly with myths, there will have been a desire to defend wrongdoing and make up a convenient excuse why the hero in question had to do it and wasn’t actually that bad and it was really just the cruel gods.
It’s not like the concept of “Deus Vult” has died out either. Still doesn’t excuse inventing some superhuman force to justify shit.
I agree with most of that, except for this: Theseus clearly didn’t give a flying fuck about angering the gods, because right after kidnapping Helen, he went into the underworld to try to kidnap Persephone, the wife of the Lord of the Dead. You can’t expect me to acknowledge that Theseus was devout enough to think a fever dream was a sign to abandon Ariadne and that she’d be fine, but not afraid enough of the gods to try to kidnap a goddess out from under the nose of the lord of hell.
If he’s a demigod or otherwise high in the favour of some god or other, he might be less scared of particular gods. Hades wasn’t very popular among his brothers, so I could see Theseus being bolder with him.
More significant is the human factor of who made up the respective stories and how they wanted to frame him: one as brave against Hades, the other as devout towards the god of parties. His legend won’t have been written by a single author trying to create a consistent character.
Greek Gods and Demigods tend to be quite cruel and callous.
But also, people in the past were generally very religious. They believed their stuff. Not necessarily the tales, but the general characterisation. Particularly if the powerful gods are “known” to be vindictive and vain, you probably don’t want to offend them by dismissing their commands.
The whole origin of these superstitions was the desire to appease whatever anthropomorphised force was giving them trouble (weather, crop growth etc.), enticing it to treat them well and eventually expanded to trying to influence other things beyond (individual) human power (love, arts). If you genuinely believe that an angry god could make your life hell, it makes sense you would avoid angering them.
Not that this makes Theseus less of a dick. It’s an indictment of their dickish religion as an extension of human dickery, and particularly with myths, there will have been a desire to defend wrongdoing and make up a convenient excuse why the hero in question had to do it and wasn’t actually that bad and it was really just the cruel gods.
It’s not like the concept of “Deus Vult” has died out either. Still doesn’t excuse inventing some superhuman force to justify shit.
I agree with most of that, except for this: Theseus clearly didn’t give a flying fuck about angering the gods, because right after kidnapping Helen, he went into the underworld to try to kidnap Persephone, the wife of the Lord of the Dead. You can’t expect me to acknowledge that Theseus was devout enough to think a fever dream was a sign to abandon Ariadne and that she’d be fine, but not afraid enough of the gods to try to kidnap a goddess out from under the nose of the lord of hell.
If he’s a demigod or otherwise high in the favour of some god or other, he might be less scared of particular gods. Hades wasn’t very popular among his brothers, so I could see Theseus being bolder with him.
More significant is the human factor of who made up the respective stories and how they wanted to frame him: one as brave against Hades, the other as devout towards the god of parties. His legend won’t have been written by a single author trying to create a consistent character.
Either way, he’s a cunt.