Theseus and the Slashers from Hell

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And today our Halloween offerings continue. We're going to be talking about a story from Greek legend, that has some surprising flavor of Camp Crystal Lake about it, a little bit of Haddonfield action here. The story is commonly known as The Six Labors of Theseus, but we've been thinking about it as Theseus versus the Slashers from Hell.

There's a bit more slasheriness to this than you would expect.

That's right. Yeah, we're kind of giving it the grindhouse treatment here with the title Theseus and the Slashers from Hell. The hero is, of course, Theseus, perhaps best known certainly to many of you, and I think widely in today's world, as the slayer of the Minotaur. I think that's the most famous tale involving this hero. But here he's going up against six evildoers who are either mortals or largely mortal in form, with a few caveats we'll get into.

We may loosely frame them as slashers, as sadistic warlords, as bandits, as serial killers of antiquity, And yes, if we're daring, individuals loosely associated with the underworld, because he's going to be going up against the six different killers of the Saronic Gulf, which is formed between the peninsulas of Attica and Argolis and forms part of the Aegean Sea.

The sites of these killers snake around the Gulf on the land road between the cities of Treason and Athens, an area that is also riddled with caves and vents. connected in some sources and works of scholarship to openings to the underworld. So by some measures, yeah, we might think of these six killers as manifestations of these adjacent thresholds to another world. It's all a bit more nuanced than this, as we'll get into. But yeah, I think we can more or less embrace the grindhouse title of Theseus and the Slashers from Hell.

Do you remember the Peplum movie we watched? I think it was called Hercules in the Haunted World, the one with Reg Park in it. As him playing Hercules in this movie, it had a grossly misused Christopher Lee where they dubbed his voice, but directed by Mario Bava, where Hercules fights through the underworld and In that movie, they put one of the villains from this legend just randomly in hell. They take Procrustes, the guy, the bedtime mutilator, who we'll talk about later, and they put him as one of the villains that Hercules has to fight down in the underworld.

I forgot about that entirely. I don't remember him being measured for a bed at all.

Yeah, they don't really... I don't remember how that scene plays out. And I remember the Procrustes in the movie is sort of this rock monster type thing. It seems a little bit less human. I don't know if there's any legendary or ancient text-based precedent for putting Procrustes in hell. I somewhat doubt it. I think this is an earth-dwelling killer in the stories that I know.

Yeah, I'm not aware of any particular film treatment that really gets into Theseus and these six evildoers. But I think there's room there for exploration. If anyone out there is looking to cash in on the post-Odyssey enthusiasm for Greek mythology, yeah, dig into it. There's a lot of stuff like this that hasn't received as much attention.

I can imagine a really good Robert Eggers take on the Theseus tale, or, you know, the kind of dusty, nasty, old-world look at Theseus going out to fight all the blood spillers. But anyway, I wanted to talk for a minute about source material. Uh, so as you can imagine, the, the story of Theseus and his early six labors is one that has featured in many different ancient texts. There are many tellings of and references to this story or parts of the story throughout the ancient world. Uh, and there are a lot of differences between those tellings. So we're going to feature different texts and quote from different texts in this episode. I think, uh, One of our major sources is going to be Plutarch's Life of Theseus,

especially for the prologue to the slasher part. But we can pull details from other ancient texts as needed. And when quoting from Plutarch, I'm actually going to use a couple of different translations. The older John Dryden translation is really great for how he phrases some things. But I'm also going to feature the Bernadotte Perrin translation, which is an earlier 20th century translation.

Excellent. And a source I'll be referring to a fair amount here is Monsters and Monarchs, Serial Killers in Classic Myth and History by Debbie Felton, the professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose work we also referenced in our series on Haunted Houses of the Ancient World.

It's a really cool book, and it goes into a lot more than just what we're talking about here today. So if your pyramid of interests includes both Greek mythology and true crime, definitely pick up that book. Totally.

I haven't read this one, but based on your references to it in our notes and stuff, it seems like a really great source. I do want to mention one thing to avoid any confusion. So I know there's going to be some true crime of the ancient world in that book, but the stories we're talking about today are not true crime. They are myth crime. So Theseus is considered a legendary figure. He's Probably not a person who really lived in history, but sort of interlocks with the legendary history of Greece. And so we get references to Theseus that have different levels of magical integration in them.

Like there are tellings of the Theseus story that are more just like mythology. They're like any other myth you would read about gods and monsters and stuff like that. And then there are tellings of the Theseus story that are more on the rationalistic history side of things. And I think that's more what you get with Plutarch. Plutarch was offering a kind of, I'm going to try to strip down the story and tell it as if like what I think probably really happened in the life of this person.

So, yeah, there's definitely none of that, you know, the flavor of portals to the underworld or anything. with Plutarch. I mean, we are dealing with characters that when you get into other sources, like, yeah, technically they're demigods. In some cases, they are siblings or half-siblings to Theseus himself, who is also the son of a god. But Plutarch's approach to it, yeah, is more down to earth, maybe stripped down budget-wise, if we're thinking of it as a motion picture here, you know, relying less on spectacular special effects and more on gritty, believable, like, touchable, practical effects.

Like, the references to mythical animals will mostly come from the other sources. And Plutarch is going to try to be like, eh, this monster pig, I think it was really just a lady people didn't like.

Yeah.

For the most part, we have just a hero, a man with a great future ahead of him, who decides that, hey, he's going to go out and challenge himself by taking out some outlaws. So, yeah, almost like a Western in some respects, I guess. Right. I also think of it as kind of like a biker movie, you know.

Biker.

Yeah.

Like one good biker versus a lot of bad bikers.

Yeah.

Yeah. On the road from one town to the next and the lawless highway.

Oh, that's it. That's a theme I want to come back to later. So when we I guess actually we should start with some background. Talk about like who was the CS according to these storytellers and get into the background of the six laborers. And so, Rob, I'm going to work from my notes here, but I know you've got some stuff on this same part of the story.

So please stop me anywhere here and add whatever you've got. So the action begins in a city called Treason, which is on the Peloponnese southwest of Athens. And the king and founder of Treason in this story is a guy named Pythias. Pythias has a daughter named Aethra. And Aethra conceives a child with a man named Aegis, who is king of Athens. Plutarch writes, this is the Bernadotte Perrin translation, quote, Learning that it was the daughter of Pythias with whom he had consorted, and suspecting that she was with child by him, he, meaning Aegis, left a sword and a pair of sandals hidden under a great rock, which had a hollow in it just large enough to receive these objects.

Doesn't say how he got them under the rock. I assume he's got a bunch of people working for him. But then Aegis tells Aethra that if she ever has a son and if her son is able to lift the rock and take the treasures from underneath it, that her son should come see him in Athens to receive his birthright as son of a king. But he also says he should come in secret because he's going to have many jealous enemies.

Hmm.

So later, Aethra does give birth to a son, and she names her son Theseus. Theseus is raised by Pythias and instructed by a tutor. It names the tutor, says it's this guy named Conadus. And I think that's to give us the idea that he's brought up right, like he gets a proper education. He probably learns philosophy and rhetoric and, you know, the kingly arts and all those things.

And it says he observes the proper rituals of a young man, a martial young man, a man of war. He goes to Delphi and he sacrifices some of his hair. Now, all the time he's growing up, Aethra keeps the secret of his father's identity from Theseus. Plutarch says that Pythias intentionally spreads a rumor that his grandson was begotten not by a king from some other city, not by the king of Athens, but by Poseidon, god of the sea. Quote, for Poseidon is highly honored by the people of treason, and he is the patron god of their city. To him they offer firstfruits in sacrifice, and they have his trident as an emblem on their coinage. So Plutarch is giving a rationalization. I think he may be kind of

explaining away other versions of the story of Theseus saying like, oh, if you've heard that his father was Poseidon, that's because King Pythias spread this rumor about him because everybody around there liked Poseidon. So that's like a good thing to be in treason. Because there are other versions of the story in which Theseus has different fathers, right?

Right, right. Yeah, definitely this idea that Theseus is himself a demigod, is a son of Poseidon, much in the same way that Hercules is, of course, a son of Zeus. And one of the things that Felton stresses that, you know, we should keep in mind with all things Theseus is that he was for the longest kind of a regional hero with popularity centered in his home city of Athens. And, you know, certainly from our standpoint, you know, via the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, You know, he is canonized in our understanding of Greek mythology and antiquity. And we kind of see him more or less having equal stature with Hercules. I was thinking about this. Like, if you ask an average person on the street, name one

Greek hero, they're probably going to say Heracles or Hercules, you know. But if you ask them, well, tell me what Theseus slayed and tell me what Heracles slayed. they're probably, if they're going to name any kind of monster, they're going to name the Minotaur. Or at least that's my guess anyway. I feel like Theseus and the Minotaur is, you know, certainly together, they have this iconic stature that's up there with anything else in Greek mythology.

With Heracles, you got so many slayings, they kind of blur together. People remember maybe the Hydra.

Yeah. But then he has his cousin's help on that. But, you know, in any story, there's going to be a little bit of help, right? But yeah, it's kind of like, We have Heracles at home, if home is Athens. That's basically what's going on here. And so for the longest, like Theseus' fandom was tied to Athens, to the city-state of Athens, and is tied up as well with propaganda about Athens and against the enemies of Athens. So we're going to come back to elements of that as this all plays out. But yeah, Heracles was widely popular throughout the Greek world, while Theseus was, again, more of a regional city-state Heracles. Both are mentioned in the writings of Homer, roughly, you know, 8th century BCE. But Theseus wasn't really all

that popular in Athens till after 510 BCE. And the sorts of things that we're seeing Theseus do in this story, it's exactly the same sort of things that Heracles was also up to. Heracles also slayed a whole bunch of bandits and headhunters and skull crushers and so forth. So there is a lot to this that is kind of like, you know, generic Heracles adventure, but tied to a different city, um, that eventually has equal stature with it. And I believe Plutarch even kind of, you know, more or less alludes to this as, uh, to some of this as well, like pointing out, I was like, look, Heracles is great.

And he killed a lot of bandits, but he couldn't kill all of them. There's some clever bandits, some clever evildoers out there. Uh, you know, one hero can only do some so much. Some of them hid from Heracles. Uh, there are plenty of villains out there for, uh, You know, lesser heroes like Theseus to deal with.

Totally. And the comparison between Theseus and Heracles is not just something we're observing retrospectively. Like, it's there in the text. Like, Plutarch says that Theseus is obsessed with Heracles. He's, you know, he's all about him. I'll get to a quote about that in just a minute. But anyway, just to continue the story up to the beginning of the six labors.

So Theseus, yeah, he grows up to be a young man. It says of strength and many virtues. He is strong of body. He has skill and prowess. It says he has firm spirit, intelligence and wisdom. So one day, Aethra reveals the truth to Theseus about his father, that his father is Aegis, the king of Athens. and about the treasures that are waiting for him hidden under the rock. Remember, he left those in the hollow under the rock. Theseus goes to the rock. It says he easily lifts it up, puts his shoulder to it. No problem. Just lifts that rock right up there and retrieves the sword and the sandals that were put there for him. And now Pythias instructs Theseus to travel to Athens by sea. So we're again talking about how even though the action of the

story does not begin in Athens, Theseus is going to go on to become associated with the city of Athens. He's sort of the natural, the national hero of Athens. And he's got to get there before he can, can become the patron of Athens.

Yeah. But how are you going to get there? Right. And in fact, he advises him. He's like, look, The land road to Athens is, of course, famously dangerous. It's just a death trap. There are these six different evildoers, bandits or warlords, however you want to think of them. We'll get into the terminology here in a minute. But yeah, they rule the land route. If you take the highway to Athens, that's just a death sentence. So don't do that.

You want to just shoot straight across the Saronic Gulf. You want to travel to Athens by boat. And you'll get there faster and more to the point you'll get there alive.

Now, it's funny that Plutarch explains the problem with overland travel as not something just specific to Theseus, but like a general problem. So I'm going to read from Plutarch here. This is the Perrin translation. Quote, For verily that age produced men who in work of hand and speed of foot and vigor of body were extraordinary and indefatigable men.

But they applied their powers to nothing that was fitting or useful. Nay, rather, they exulted in monstrous insolence and reaped from their strength the harvest of cruelty and bitterness, mastering and forcing and destroying everything that came in their path. And as for reverence and righteousness, justice and humanity, they thought that most men praised these qualities for lack of courage to do wrong and for fear of being wronged.

and considered them no concern of men who were strong enough to get the upper hand. It's like, oh yeah, people only do right because they're weak. You know, real tough guys, they just take what they want. Anyway, continuing from Plutarch, quote, some of these creatures Heracles cut off and destroyed as he went about, but some escaped his notice as he passed by, crouching down and shrinking back and were overlooked in their abjectness. And when Heracles met with calamity, and after the slaying of Iphidus, removed into Lydia, and for a long time did slave service there in the house of Umphali, then Lydia indeed obtained great peace and security. But in the regions of Hellas the old villainies burst forth and broke out anew, there being none

to rebuke and none to restrain them. Wow. So killers are just everywhere. The old villainy broke forth. It's like a flood spilling out. It had once been dammed up by Hercules, but Hercules missed a few. And then they just multiplied like cockroaches. Now they're just villains everywhere. And so you can't take the land roads.

Yeah, it sounds kind of like a sequel spinoff. Like he didn't get all the bad guys. There's some left and we have this new character just as exciting as Heracles. I think you guys in Athens are especially going to like Yeah.

So Pythias tells Theseus to go by sea, but Theseus says, no, I'm not going to do that. Instead, he says he's going to travel by land and he's going to face all of these bandits by himself in order to prove his worth. And Plutarch says there are two reasons for this. One is, again, that he is obsessed with Heracles, who is a distant cousin of his. I think maybe they're second cousins or something. or first cousins once removed. I don't remember how that works out, but he's somehow cousins with Heracles, and he wants to be a vanquisher of evildoers just like his cousin. But also, he does not want to appear before his father as a boy with no great deeds to his name. There's a line about how he doesn't want to show up with an unstained sword,

like this sword needs blood on.

Yeah, because he's grown up outside of Athens, but with, again, kind of like an Athenian upbringing. He's been given all of the educational and cultural advantages, but he is untested. And so he wants to test himself.

Quote, in such a spirit and with such thoughts, he set out determined to do no man any wrong, but to punish those who offered him violence. So he's been warned. It's dangerous. out there. You shouldn't do it. But he's going anyway, and he's going to slash the slashers.

Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, we're using different terms for these guys. Slashers, that's more what we're calling them. But you also see them called just villains, robbers, bandits. As Felton points out, Yeah, a lot of modern translations and retellings are going to use words like robbers and bandits, but most of the ancient Greek literary sources do not.

And in fact, they don't categorize them as anything on the whole, often just referring to each individual by their given name. There is a term that is frequently, that is at least sometimes used in the ancient texts. She points out kakorgos, which apparently means evildoer. So I think if you're going to call them anything, as a group, they are evildoers. And this is important when you get into the details of, the overarching details of who they are and what they do. Felton stresses that in each case, you know, loot is not the primary motivation for these different killers. You know, they are engaging, at least some of them are engaging in some form of banditry as well.

But it seems that the cruelty, the murder, the mutilation itself targeting innocent individuals on the whole, that is the whole point of what they're up to. Uh, they're out there in the wilds, um, you know, ungoverned, ungovernable, and all they want to do is cause misery and mayhem.

With a couple of them, it feels like they're trying to exert a kind of dominance or superiority over people who travel through by, by beating them up or killing them. I think you get that with paraffinities and something somewhat with Circe on, um, And then with others, you get more of a flavor of just criminal insanity. People doing things that don't make any sense, but they just kill.

Yeah. And so one of Felton's main focuses is to compare them to serial killers. And she writes, quote, they resemble modern serial killers in many ways. They kill primarily for the pleasure they derive from it and only secondarily for profit. They exhibited sadism and a consistent pattern in the methods of killing. Their brutality far surpassed that of the typical highway marauder. They not only robbed and killed, but tortured and mutilated their victims. And as we'll see, I think, yeah, I think the serial killer comparison is right on, especially if we compare it not so much to real world serial killers, but the sort of sensational fictional serial killers that you see in modern media, you know,

TV shows like Hannibal and so forth. As we've already teased out, I think there's More than a little bit of the slasher from the horror movie to be found in many of these examples. And also just any kind of modern media where you have kind of a no man's land and some sort of like deranged individuals that are enjoying the lawlessness. Like, again, my mind comes back to 70s outlaw biker films about, you know, deranged anti hippies who are killing people just for kicks.

Yeah, I absolutely see that. Strangely, I kept thinking about what slasher movies these stories most remind me of. And more than anything, I was thinking of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These get closer to TCM than any other slasher franchise I could think of.

Yeah, the lawless rural spaces between the big cities. I think they're both feeding on similar energy and similar anxieties. Because A question inevitably arises in all of this. Okay, we're reading these stories of these different warlords, these different bandits or evildoers, and the dangers of traveling by road from treason to Athens. And you have to ask, well, was this for real? Was this, like, on any level true?

And Felton, you know, agrees that, yeah, this is one of those places in myth where we're not supposed to take things too literally. Because obviously, if the roads were this dangerous, nobody would dare to travel them. Rather, these are likely best understood as representing societal concerns on the whole.

Okay.

However, she does stress that at this point in time, this is like 6th century BCE, the Greek city-states are still very much countries unto themselves. They're only really beginning to communicate regularly with one another. And therefore, the highways between these city-states were connected. well known to be dangerous and unpatrolled. They were frequented by bandits. There were dangers out there. And she says that some of the villains that Theseus tangles with may have been based on real bandits or real people. We'll get into some specifics on that.

But they might have, in other cases, been creations of political propaganda, as we'll get into. But by and large, she stresses, they likely manifested the fears of They were considered by anyone who was even considering a journey by land instead of taking the costlier sea road, particularly if you were going to travel to Athens, you know, across the Gulf here. So I think that's worth keeping in mind.

And again, coming back to like TCM and everything else, roads and highways have long had this flavor. You know, you find this in folk traditions and mythology, horror stories and also real accounts of crime and mayhem. all over the world. When you have roads connecting places, those roads are not always well patrolled. They are the sorts of spaces where horrors and terrors can occur. And even in our modern day, like, you know, these are places where we often have our horror stories take place.

Yeah, absolutely. Though I will say, there is a more palpable sense of the danger of overland travel. Um, and in fact, I would say travel by sea as well, actually in the ancient, in ancient sources, um, then you would normally have and say people just talking about traveling between cities in the United States, you know, in, in our context, there is more of a feeling of order imposed in the spaces between, but actually this connected, uh, to something I wanted to talk about later in the episodes as we're talking about it. Now I figure it, We can go ahead and open it up. So later I wanted to discuss ways in which the story of the labors of Theseus does or does not connect to tropes you actually see in slasher movies. One of those

tropes is a general idea of spatial transgression, going where one should not. So in a lot of slasher movies, the victim... either actually trespasses, like goes onto a property or into a house that is forbidden. You're not supposed to go there, and then they get in trouble. That happens in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

You don't want to go messing around other folks' properties. Some folks don't like that, and they don't mind showing you.

That's right. Or it might not be specific trespassing. Maybe you're going to a place you're technically allowed to go, but you have been warned it is dangerous.

Mm-hmm.

And you go, anyway, you, you disobey, do not heed the warnings. You get this in say the, uh, Friday the 13th franchise with a crazy Ralph saying you can't go to that camp. It's got a death curse.

Yeah. Yeah. I just rewatched the first one. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, and so there can be. Actually, I was thinking about it in there, two different versions of spatial transgression and slasher movies. I was thinking about it as going out and going in. So. Going in is entering a place of danger. This place has a death curse and you go there anyway versus going out like you're leaving a place of safety. Maybe you leave the city or you leave civilization and you go out into the wilderness or you go out into rural America, you know, and there's like rural weirdness. Who knows what's going on out there? And while I had trouble finding real evidence of the other slasher movie tropes prefigured by the story of Theseus, this one I really did say, this kind of lines up. Theseus is warned of the danger. Again,

according to Plutarch, his grandfather's like, you don't go by road. I'm going to tell you about the six different slashers that are on the road. And he doesn't pay any mind. He's like, I'm young. I'm brave. I can do it. Yeah. Uh, and I was also thinking, is this a going in or going out danger? I guess it's kind of both, but it's more going out, right? Like in the context of the. Both to some degree in real ancient history and certainly in the mythic context of the story, the population centers, the ancient city states are a, are a place of safety and civilization. When you go out, you go outside of those populated areas where there is authority and structure and protection, you go into places of danger

and murder. And that does have some significance because I think the going in transgression horror movies versus the going out transgression movies is are somewhat different. Like the ones that are about the dangers of going out, I think are more generally paranoid. They have more of a view of a dangerous world. And that's the version we're getting here.

We're getting the more paranoid, generalized danger view of the world. Yeah.

Don't go into the rural countryside. Don't go into the outback and so forth.

Yeah.

Don't go into the jungle.

Another thing I wanted to pick up on is something that you were saying a minute ago. about the real dangers of travel in the ancient world. I was looking for statistics on this and I couldn't find anything very good about what are the real probabilities of danger in, you know, traveling over land in the ancient world. I don't know if there's really any way to calculate that.

But I'll at least say it's true based on my general reading about ancient Greece that that traveling between population centers by yourself was considered dangerous. Like this, like multiple ancient authors talk about banditry on isolated roads and that, that going between inhabited areas was a recognized danger. Uh, they mentioned risks of being robbed, of being killed or abducted on often like mountain passes and stuff. Um, And I think there are a couple of different ways to think about this. One is, like, you were talking about, like, the absence of authority. In some places that are far away from authorities, there was little that could or would be done about it. Like, maybe there's nobody in particular

whose job it is to make sure this long stretch of uninhabited country is safe. So, you know, a bandit wants to post up there, who's going to do anything about it?

Right, right. Like a city-state may lay claim to that land, but that doesn't mean they have a presence there.

Yeah. In other places, I think you may just get the fact that local inhabitants may have seen it as like, you know, our job is essentially to raid travelers passing through. Like, this is our place. You're coming through here. And you might have something like a very blurry line between toll collection and banditry.

And when does one become the other, right? What's the line between the two? And then add storytelling and myth-making on top of that.

That's right. So I think it's interesting how this one really kind of does line up with tropes we see in slasher movies, unlike some of the other tropes we're going to get into later, where if you want to see any connection, it's a lot more of a stretch. Theseus is warned, you don't want to go down that road, it's really dangerous, but he goes anyway. Because he wants to be like Heracles, and he believes he's young and invincible.

And so that's exactly what we're going to get. A string of six encounters. like sub-bosses in a video game, as our hero makes his way to Athens to meet his father for the first time, at least his mortal father. So that's what we're going to do for the next large chunk of the podcast here, is just go through one by one, talk about the slasher, evildoer, bandit king he encounters, what's written about them, what we might tease apart regarding this individual, and then we'll move on to the next one.

Okay, first killer. Periphetes, the basher with bronze. Okay, I'm going to read from Plutarch. This is the Peron translation. And so in the first place, in Epidaria, when Periphetes, who used a club as his weapon and on this account was called club-bearer, laid hold of him and tried to stop his progress, he grappled with him and slew him.

And being pleased with the club, he took it and made it his weapon and continued to use it just as Heracles did with the lion's skin. That hero wore the skin to prove how great a wild beast he had mastered, and so Theseus carried the club to show that although it had been vanquished by him, in his own hands it was invincible. Mm-hmm. And then another phrasing I also wanted to draw from a different telling of the story. This is the version that appears in the bibliotheca or library of Apollodorus, sometimes called Pseudo-Apollodorus. Basically, this is a compilation of myths and legends that was once attributed to the 2nd century BCE Greek author Apollodorus of Athens.

Scholars have established that it cannot be by this guy, by Apollodorus of Athens because of anachronisms. It's actually probably from the first or second century CE, real author unknown. So it's called pseudo Apollodorus, like false Apollodorus. And this is the Fraser translation. Again, it's talking about the story.

It says he comes to Epidaurus. He slays Periphetes, quote, who was surnamed the club man from the club, which he carried. For being crazy on his legs, he carried an iron club with which he dispatched the passersby. That club Theseus wrested from him and continued to carry about. I wanted to include that because he's the club man and also because it says he's crazy on his legs.

Some sources say that Periphetes was lame in one leg. And so I wonder, could that be what Fraser is translating with crazy on his legs here?

That's what I assume, because that is something that Felton also gets into, talking about how in some tellings, Periphetes is said to be a son of Hephaestus, and therefore a crippled demigod himself, who at times uses the club as a walking stick, as well as a way to bash in the people he wishes to subjugate. And in this, we have very much a blunt force adversary here. He's got a single weapon gimmick and he's defeated. And that gimmick, the weapon is then taken as a trophy by Theseus and then used as his weapon. And also, you know, to show just how tough he is. Like, yeah, yeah, I took out the club man. Now I'm the club man.

Who's the club man now?

Yeah.

You know, almost all of these encounters have something of a turnabout in them. Either Theseus uses the person's own method of violence back against them, or there's some other kind of reversal like that. In this case, he takes the club from the club man and becomes the new club man, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and that's something you would generally want to see in a slasher movie. You know, you want to see Jason get his head cut off or run through on something. You don't want to see him, I don't know, just shot or... Or arrested. That's not a fitting end to a Friday the 13th movie.

That would be funny, putting the cuffs on Jason.

Yeah, there needs to be a proper reversal. And we get almost a literal reversal in most of these encounters, including this one. He who bashes with the club is bashed himself. Speaking of that club, Felton mentions that it's usually wooden in tellings, but other times it's bronze or iron. And there's at least one version of it where He's going to bash in Theseus with this, Periphetes is. And then Theseus is like, hey, can I take a look at that club of yours? I've heard it's made out of bronze. And he's like, oh, sure, take a look.

And then, you know, he kills him with it.

Very Bugs Bunny.

Yeah, or certainly reminded me of Jack Frost that, oh, but I don't know how to sit on a shovel. You'll have to show me. So he just hands it over. But Felton does mention that via this connection to Hephaestus, there is this idea that he is on some level maybe a deformed killer. A trope in its modern form that Felton connects to debunked pseudosciences like criminal anthropology. And of course, we recognize that this is a familiar trope in horror fiction and all sorts of fiction. Just the idea that some sort of inner distortion of the soul has to be manifested in a physical, visual distortion of the character.

Yeah.

Which, you know, and we see this all over the place with slashers, right? Like Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and, you know, any number of slasher, right? There's some sort of injury that they sustained, some sort of physical ailment that hints at some sort of inner ailment.

Yeah. And it's also part of the Sort of the monstrousness that is hidden to later be revealed. Like a common trope is the masked killer. Sometimes the mask is to hide the killer's identity, but other times the killer's identity is known. And what the mask hides is what their face looks like. There's something inherently like just unusual about the face. In the case of Jason Voorhees, he is somebody who has a facial deformity. And at the end of each movie, the mask comes off and you see what his face really looks like.

Yeah. Here, we have no mask. And there's a lot to make of that. I think you could get into ideas of how the ancient Greeks viewed masks and certainly focused on their importance as a transformative act in ritual and in theater, of course. And certainly there are theatrics to the murders here. There are ritualistic aspects to the murders here, but they're not really theater or ritual in the deeper ancient Greek sense of the word. So I almost get a sense like they just wouldn't, like they didn't think about masks in the same way that we think of them. They didn't emphasize them. And then also on the lawless highway between city-states, why wear a mask?

You don't have to. Like this is a world where you can be the monster that you are.

You almost get the sense that most of Theseus' enemies in the story are proud of what they're doing. There's nothing, there's no reason to hide.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

All right, so that's one down, five to go. Who's next?

Next is Sinus, also known as Pideocamptes, meaning the pine bender or he who bends pines or bends trees. Here, the Plutarch text does not give us much to work with on the mechanics of this slashing or the conflict itself. It just says that Theseus slew Cenus, the bender of pines, after the same manner in which he himself had destroyed many others before. But there is a bit more grisly detail in some other sources. So I'm going to start with those others. So here I'm quoting from Pausanias in his book, The Description of Greece. This is an ancient travel guide. by the Greek author and geographer Pausanias, 2nd century CE. This is the translation by Jones and Ormerod. Quote, At the beginning of the Isthmus is the place where

the brigand Cenus used to take hold of pine trees and draw them down. Okay, so he's bending down pine trees. All those whom he overcame in fight, he used to tie to the trees and then allow them to swing up again. Thereupon, each of the pines used to drag to itself the bound man. And as the bond gave way in neither direction, but was stretched equally in both, he was torn in two. This was the way in which Zenos himself was slain by Theseus.

All right. So we have an elaborate method of torture slash execution, uh, involving bent pine trees, um, in, in, in a way, very cartoonish in its own right. Um, I mean, except for being torn in half. That's the rather grisly detail. But as Felton discusses it, there's at least some versions of this where only one tree is used.

And he's just launching people into the air like a Bugs Bunny trap. But then I think in the vast majority of the tellings, yeah, there's an idea that like two trees are used, like strapped to two different legs and then catapulted into two pieces, a bisection of the individual.

Okay, so that clears up. I was getting confused because when I was reading different versions of this, it sounded like they were describing different things. And so I guess they are. Like some versions, you're just getting launched into the sky. In other versions, the bent trees are ripping you apart. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So man, Sinus has to be pretty strong to bend these trees down like he does.

But you get the idea that he also may be using some kind of mechanism or device to bend the trees that way. because there is a line after the part I read in Plutarch. So it says that Theseus comes along and then destroyed Sinus in the same way that Sinus had destroyed others that came before, quote, and this he did without having either practiced or ever learned the art of bending these trees to show that natural strength is above all art. So maybe there's some kind of technique involved there that Cenus was able to do it because he'd figured out the system for bending the trees.

Theseus was just that strong.

Hmm. Now Felton notes that in, in some sources, uh, Cenus is himself also a demigod and therefore I guess maybe has access to that kind of strength as well. Uh, but yeah, he's supposed to be a son of Poseidon and some of these tellings, which would make him, uh, Theseus is half brother. Uh, and, uh, it is, Felton discusses the possible connection here to be made between the splitting of a person into two. This is when it's used in ancient Greece. There's like a theme of duality within oneself that is often explored. And, you know, we see that throughout human storytelling. But there's something to be had here with the idea that they are sort of like two different sides of the same coin. Like they're

half-brothers here. One is good and noble, one is evil, and then they're pitted against each other. And we get this, in at least one version of the story, we have Theseus having to ritually cleanse himself after slaying Cenus, after strapping Cenus to the pines and splitting him in two or launching him into the sky or whatever, which Felton describes as a, quote, spiritual atonement for the blood pollution. So, yeah, some possible connections here, duality, physical bisection. two sides of the same coin with these two characters, both sons of the same God. And then Theseus needing to like cleanse himself of what he has had to do to defeat this guy.

It's interesting the idea that there would need to be a cleansing after this one, but not after the others. Am I understanding that right?

Yeah. I think it's predominantly when there is an element of cleansing, it's going to take place after all six before he can enter Athens. And we'll come back to that. But there's at least one telling where the cleansing has to happen now. And maybe that is tied more to the idea that this guy is, is like his dark double.

And there's like, somehow it's more personal. But I think the more common trope is after all six murders have been murdered, he has to cleanse himself of that murder.

Well, I was curious because in Plutarch's telling, there's a whole other subplot after this encounter where, uh, Cenus has a daughter who then has a son with Theseus. So it says like Theseus and the daughter, like Theseus tells the daughter he's not going to harm her. And then they have sex and then she becomes pregnant and she has a son named Melanippus. And then that character goes on to found like a colony of Greeks living somewhere.

And it uses this story to explain why they have certain customs with regard to like how they treat Melanippus. certain flora, like asparagus thorn and stuff.

Yeah, it's my understanding that the pine tree aspect of this is tied to actual flora in this area. And maybe there's sort of like a sinister interpretation of the flora. Like, oh, you're traveling through that area with all those pine trees. You know what they do with those pine trees? They split people in half with them.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then, of course, you know, to be clear... There are plenty of grisly examples from throughout history of people being split in half, and we're not going to go down the road of exploring all of those. But it also definitely factors into our horror fiction.

And, I.

Mean, it also made me think of Goldfinger, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Lay James Bond out on the table, and then you're going to threaten to cut him right up the middle with a laser beam. You know, that's where my mind went here. So it's sort of a Bond villain aspect to this evildoer as well. Yeah.

Man, that's a slow-moving laser, though.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the trees, at least, would be, I guess, pretty quick.

I'm trying to think about horror movies. I'm mainly just thinking about Fulci in Conquest with the werewolves.

Oh, yeah, the tarot, A Lady in Half, yeah. That's probably the best one. I think there are plenty of other examples, but you're getting into some pretty grisly territory.

Okay, you ready for the next encounter?

Let's do it. We're going to get more animalistic with this one.

That's right. So next we come to the Cromionian sow, who I was thinking of as the hog of the forsaken, the pork of crime.

Nice.

So this is the only one of the slashers that is possibly not human, possibly not human, because there are at least two versions of this story, even within Plutarch. And then there are different versions in other ancient tellings as well. So in Plutarch, So one version of the story is the Cromionian sow is a monster pig. And the other version is a nasty lady who kills people on the road. The pig was sometimes said to have been owned by a witch named Fia. Some sources said that Fia was actually the pig's name or that they were both named to that. So the witch is named pig.

She has or the witch is named Fia. And then Fia has a pig named Fia.

OK, so either a monster pig. A monster pig owned by a lady or just a lady?

Just a lady. Okay, so here's the Dryden translation of the Plutarch on the Cromionian sow. Quote, the Cromionian sow, by Crom, Crom, the Cromionian sow, which they called Phea, was a savage and formidable wild beast, by no means an enemy to be despised. I think that means not an enemy to be disrespected or discounted, like a worthy adversary.

Theseus killed her, going out of his way on purpose to meet and engage her, so that he might not seem to perform all his great exploits out of mere necessity, being also of opinion that it was the part of a brave man to chastise villainous and wicked men when attacked by them, but to seek out and overcome the more noble wild beasts. Others relate that Thea was a woman, a robber full of cruelty and lust, that lived in Cromyon, And had the name of sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners and afterwards was killed by Theseus. And then a very short other version. This is from, again, Apollodorus, the library of Apollodorus or Pseudo-Apollodorus. Quote, third, he slew at Chromion the sow that was called Phea

after the old woman who bred it. That sow, some say, was the offspring of Echidna and Typhon. So there you get, it's her sow. She bred it. And gets its name from her.

So he kills the monster pig. If the monster pig is working for an old lady, we don't know what happens to the old lady. I guess she's fine. Maybe her power is removed if her monster pig is taken out of action.

Right. Or it's just a woman who kills people on the road and Theseus kills her. But I like how Plutarch gives explanations either way and says in this one, the killer did not stop him on the road. Whether it be pig or lady, he sought them out and killed them.

Yeah. So the hunter, I mean, the hunted has become the hunter in this case.

Yeah. Yeah.

Felton points out something interesting here with the connection to serial killers in the modern sense. And that is that, yeah, depending on the telling you're looking at, we have a female killer here, a female evildoer. And she writes, quote, The Greeks clearly believed that not only men but also women, and not merely mythological women like Medea and Clytemnestra, were capable of using not just secretive methods of killing, such as poisoning, but also committing violent mutilation murder. Today, an average of one out of every six serial killers is a woman, a ratio coincidentally represented in Theseus' encounters.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I think.

If it's a pig and not, wait, no, sorry. If it's not a pig, but it is a woman.

Yeah. If it is a pig, no serial killers in today's world are actually monster pigs. So it's, it's meaningless if that's the case.

A little unclear in Plutarch's version where if it's a pig, is it a monster pig or just like a big dangerous pig? I would guess the latter because I don't know, you know, this is the more rationalistic telling.

Yeah. If you're going rationalistic, it's just a wild pig that can certainly be dangerous. But you can also lean more into, oh, it's the offspring of Echidna. It is a monster like the rest of her monstrous offspring. But as we've discussed on the show before, we certainly have counterparts in horror cinema, perhaps most notably to us anyway, Razorback from 1984, right?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's a monster, what, monster hog in the outback? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, by Russell Mulcahy, the director of Highlander.

Yeah, yeah.

Also made this movie. Yeah.

So that's probably the most direct comparison to be made. I was also reminded of Mason Verger's revenge plot against Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal, where he's going to feed Hannibal to Sardinian boars. So that's a case where you have a villain who has essentially monster pigs at his disposal that he's using to carry out his evil deeds.

It's not a lot of slasher movie killers have pets. Usually they're kind of solo. They're working alone.

Yeah, I mean, having a pet can tend to humanize them too much, right? Like, they're not likable fellas. That's their whole deal.

Okay, killer number four. You ready?

Yeah, we're halfway through.

What's next? This is Skiron. I'm thinking of Skiron as the cliff kicker or the turtle fattener. Here's the Dryden translation. He also slew Skiron upon the borders of Megara. casting him down from the rocks being as most report, a notorious robber of all passengers. And as others add accustomed out of insolence and wantonness to stretch forth his feet to strangers, commanding them to wash them. And then while they did it with a kick to send them down the rock into the sea. Okay. You getting that there?

So he holds out his feet. He says, wash my feet. Uh, We can get into exactly what this means and why people would actually wash his feet when commanded. But he says, wash my feet. They say, OK, I'm going to wash your feet. And then he kicks them with the foot and sends them over the cliff into the rocks below in the sea.

Yeah. So there's a this guy sounds at least on the surface like a little bit of a freak. He's also clearly there's a power trip involved here. But also he is a clearly a betrayer of of custom. Because once someone has said, okay, I will wash your feet, like the idea is like, okay, this is a sign of honor that I'm showing you. You're not going to kick me into the ocean where I might be eaten by a monster or something. Like you've betrayed all the laws of hospitality here.

So you mentioned being eaten by a monster. That actually does come in. So Plutarch just says kicked down the rock into the sea. Other accounts feature a giant turtle.

Yeah, a giant sea turtle, which we'll come back to, but I found this also just very puzzling.

This quote is from, again, Pseudo-Apollodorus, the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus, the Fraser translation. Quote, Fourth, he slew Scyron, the Corinthian, son of Pelops, or, as some say, of Poseidon. Oh, another possible son of Poseidon.

Yeah, another half-brother.

He, in the Megarian territory, held the rocks called after him Scyronian. and compelled passersby to wash his feet. And in the act of washing, he kicked them into the deep to be the prey of a huge turtle. But Theseus seized him by the feet and threw him into the sea. So it doesn't say if the turtle ate him.

I mean, I would hope so. That's exactly the comeuppance you see in various stories where there's some sort of evildoer who keeps some sort of a monstrous pet that he feeds people to.

Yeah, you shouldn't throw people into a pit of piranhas because you're going to end up in that pit.

Exactly, yeah.

And then a little more detail from Pausanias, description of Greece again. Pausanias says, quote, the Molurian dock they thought sacred to Leucothea and Palimon, but those after it they considered accursed in that Scyron, who dwelt by them, used to cast into the sea all the strangers he met. A tortoise used to swim under the rocks to seize those that fell in. Sea tortoises are like land tortoises, except in size and for their feet, which are like those of seals. Retribution for those deeds overtook Scyron, for he was cast into the same sea by Theseus. This is followed up by Plutarch with conflicting accounts of who Scyron was and what exactly happened with him. By some accounts, he was not a bandit, not a murderer, but the

exact opposite. He was sort of a vigilante hero who punished evildoers, much like Theseus is doing here. Also, Plutarch notes accounts describing Theseus as killing Scyron much later in his life, like slaying Scyron in battle during a war in which he would conquer the city of Eleusis.

Felton... writes a little bit about this whole hero-villain thing, writing, quote, Historically, Athens and Megara were embroiled in territorial disputes in the late 6th century, at the time when the Theseus myths coalesced. So the appearance of Scyron in them as a villain strongly suggests a political motivation for his characterization here. So this may be, this is arguably an example of political propaganda in the telling of Theseus and his labors.

Okay, so it's like, imagine your country is at war with somebody, and then you say, the president of that other country, he's actually somebody who, he has stinky feet, and he asks people to wash them, and then he kicks them into a turtle's mouth.

Yeah. Now, I was really wondering, though, why a sea turtle? And I guess one answer is, okay, if you're leaning into the idea that Ski-Ron is yet another son of Poseidon, you know, then the sea turtle is a sea monster of Poseidon, and I guess that makes sense. But... If you know anything about sea turtles, and I guess we have to address that in the ancient world, they knew some things, but not everything. And, you know, the undersea world is a place of mystery and danger. But we know today that all extant forms of sea turtle are no physical threat to humans, no direct physical threat. I've swam with some species myself, keeping a respectful distance. And it's my general understanding that you'd really have to go

out of your way or be in the wrong position at the wrong time to earn even a bite from one of these guys. Furthermore, the green sea turtle is an herbivore, and the leatherback is a gelatinivore, just eating jellyfish, sea jelly. So you couldn't get any further from the truth with those two. There is, as far as I can tell, no credible example of a sea turtle that would eat people thrown into the sea by a bandit.

or that would even eat like the corpses of people thrown into the sea by a bandit.

If a leatherback sea turtle were big enough to eat you and wanted to eat you, a peek inside its mouth would make it very scary.

Yeah, it does have a very scary mouth because it has that evolutionary development where it's like, how do you keep the sea jellies you're swallowing from just sliding right back up? Well, you have backward-facing spikes in your throat, and that just keeps them caged in there.

It's like a sarlacc mouth.

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. Maybe there's some lost connection or symbolism to the sea turtle here. But it makes for, yeah, certainly a crazy encounter here. A madman on a power trip who is a terrible host and then is throwing people down to a monster. But he gets his comeuppance. Theseus throws him into the water with the monster. And again, we can only presume and maybe hope that the sea monster eats Skiron as well.

Okay, next labor. This is going to be Circeon, the murder wrestler king.

So.

Not a lot of detail on this one in most tellings. Plutarch says, this is the Peron translation, in Eleusis, moreover, he outwrestled Circeon, the Arcadian, and killed him. Not much detail there. Looking at a pseudo-apocalyptic we get, fifth, in Elusis he slew Circeon, son of Bronchus and a nymph, Argiope.

This Circeon compelled passersby to wrestle and in wrestling killed them. But Theseus lifted him up on high and dashed him to the ground. That's the whole account. Not a lot there, but I do like that detail. So Theseus doesn't just like whip out the sword and cut this guy's head off. The guy kills people by wrestling them to death. And so Theseus kills him with a wrestling move.

Yeah, out-wrestles him, and maybe, like I was imagining it as being some sort of a suplex, like he's clever, he ducks and shifts in just the right way, and again, to this telling, lifts him up and then dashes him down. And I was digging a little deeper, and I think a suplex or a suplex-like takedown is totally what is implied here, because Theseus is sometimes held as the inventor of Greek technical wrestling. Other times it's Heracles or, of course, Hermes, as we recently discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

But yeah, sometimes Theseus is held up as, oh, yeah, he's the guy who invented the superior Greek form of grappling.

I don't know anything about what that form is, but would that involve actually moves where you lift somebody up in the air and slam them down?

I'm not enough of an expert on it by any means. I don't know if it would be as theatrical as the kind of things you see in pro wrestling and lucha libre, but. I mean, you know, I think any time of any kind of like actual like legitimate, you know, combat sport where there's grappling, sometimes you're going to have that shift in momentum where someone can get somebody up in the air. And certainly if the practitioner, if the guy executing the throw is himself a demigod, then, yeah, he might be able to get some height on that move.

Now, forgive my ignorance here. Am I correct that a suplex is like. Kind of like you grapple somebody at the shoulders and then you flip their body up upside down so the legs are sticking up in the air and you've got them up vertically.

Yeah, generally. Like an example that you see in a lot of non-wrestling media is coming up behind somebody, grabbing them by the waist, and then bridging backwards and dropping them on their head, like a German suplex.

Okay.

That sort of thing, yeah.

Okay. Is there any, I mean, I don't know. This seems kind of technically difficult unless there's a major size difference in the wrestlers. But is there anything where it's like what I first pictured where I was imagining Theseus basically overhead pressing this guy like horizontally and then smashing him down?

I mean, does that happen? I don't know if that happens in like legitimate like Greco-Roman wrestling and so forth. But but certainly like if you watched any if any of you out there watched any of the Olympic wrestling and I watched a little bit of it. The more dynamic throws like that you're going to see are when there's some sort of a skill mismatch. Like this match shouldn't have actually happened because maybe these two competitors were rather unevenly assigned each other. And so in my limited experience watching like legitimate grappling, like, yeah, that's where you're going to see something crazy like that happen. And maybe that's what happens when you tackle, you lock up with someone like Theseus.

Yeah. Now, but this sorry, I was just going to say this guy seems like a great example of somebody who's clearly just trying to exert dominance over people who come through. It's like, hey, wrestle me. Yeah. What people are just trying to come by on the road. And he says, wrestle me. And then he wrestles them to death. Yeah. Yeah.

So Felton doesn't have much to say about the wrestling per se. But she does point out that this is another case of likely political propaganda because Circe on was a hero or possibly a king. in Eleusis is around 21 kilometers outside of Athens. And it was part of this Megarid territory that had territory disputes with Athens in the late sixth century BCE. So another case where it's like, oh yeah, yeah, the guy, the hero they have there or the king they have there. Yeah. Theseus took him out, just wrestled the heck out of him.

Yeah. Yeah. What a chump. Now, do we get anything like this in slasher movies? Usually not a lot of like wrestling oriented slasher movies, but there are, there are some slasher villains who sometimes kill people with like bare hand or just body moves without using a, a bladed weapon, right? Like sometimes there'll be crushings or kind of, I'm thinking Jason Voorhees at one point kind of break somebody's back on his knee.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I looked this up, um, and it, it does happen occasionally with Jason. Um, there, of course the, the sleeping bag murders in, uh, Jason X, um, But those were, I guess, in a holodeck. I'm not sure if that really happened.

Well, that's modeled on an earlier murder from Friday the 13th, Part 7, in which he attacks a campsite and he picks up somebody in a sleeping bag and whacks them against a tree.

Yeah, I guess sometimes it's barehanded. Sometimes it's barehanded with some sort of environmental factor.

Yeah.

So I guess you do see it. I imagine that when it comes to wrestling moves, your average slasher is going to be limited, right? They're going to do a single-handed choke or a double-handed choke, maybe a bear hug, they're not going to really get into the technical maneuvers so much.

Yeah. Okay, you ready for the next one?

Yeah, this is going to be number six, right? This is going to be the final boss.

The final one. This is Procrustes, the bedtime mutilator. So I'll start with the Dryden translation of Plutarch. Quote, And going a little farther, in Irenaeus he slew Damastes, otherwise called Procrustes, forcing his body to the size of his own bed, as he himself was used to do with all strangers. This he did in imitation of Hercules, who always returned upon his assailants the same sort of violence that they offered to him. Feels a little like we need a little more description there.

Yeah, it's like killed him by putting him to bed, as he put others to bed. More details required.

So some better detail appears in, again, Pseudo-Apollodorus, uh, So Fraser translates, quote, Sixth he slew Damastes, whom some call Polypemon. He had his dwelling beside the road, and he made up two beds, one small and the other big. And offering hospitality to the passersby, he laid the short men on the big bed and hammered them to make them fit the bed. But the tall men he laid on the little bed and sawed off the portions of the body that projected beyond it. OK, there you go. So this is the story of the Procrustean bed. So Procrustean is a bad host. He has two beds in his house.

They are poorly built beds. One is way too long. The other is way too short. People come into the house. If you're tall, he puts you in the short bed to cut cuts off the parts of your body that hang over the side. I guess that means cutting your feet off or maybe your head. And then if you are short, he puts you on the long bed and he smashes you until you are spread out to the length of the bed.

And we're just left to wonder what happens if someone comes in and they're just the right size. Do they get a good night's sleep? They end up, you get a good Yelp review for the place at this point. But yeah, it seems like the fix is in though. Because if you're short, if you're tall, it doesn't matter.

He's got a bed that's not going to fit just right. And he's going to murder and torture you to make you fit it.

That's right. And so it says that Theseus did to him what he had done to his guests. So I guess these I don't it doesn't say which bed he put him in, though.

Yeah. Is this guy short? Is this guy tall? I don't know. He found a way to make it hurt, though, and to make sure this guy got received some payback. I guess the the main thing that the. to mention here is that this is where we get the term Procrustean, um, which you will occasionally see used concerning something a little more deliberate. Like I was looking around to say, okay, where are some places, are there any cases where people are using this word to talk about airline seating? Um, this was on my mind since I just flew. And, uh, sure enough, you will find people complaining about airline seating and they will use the term Procrustean.

Hmm. So that would be, there are a couple of different ways I think this term is used. One is just talking about a, like a sort of one size fits all approach that does not, that does not accommodate difference as well. The other version of Procrustean is it's sometimes used to refer to any logically backwards process of fitting.

So much like Procrustes does in the story, it would be cases of resolving a mismatch by adjusting the wrong element, like adjusting the less intuitive or more difficult of the mismatched elements. So you often see, I've seen procrastinism talked about in the context of bad scientific theories or pseudoscience.

Sometimes these are procrastinian in the sense that they ask you to ignore the results of experiments and or to throw out well-established knowledge because it would contradict your pet theory instead of just realizing actually the simpler thing to do is throw out the bad theory.

So mutilating the truth to make it fit the bed of your theory. Right.

Exactly.

So this one is an interesting encounter because on one level it, whereas other ones feel more like, to me anyway, to a modern interpreter, they feel like cases of, okay, yeah, madman in the wilderness that's doing crimes and getting away with it. This one also, this one kind of feels more like a horrific parody of a guy that just runs a crappy inn. Where it's like, oh, yeah, that in none of the beds fit anybody. I think he has he has two different beds. And if you're tall, he gives you the little one. And if you're little, he gives you the tall one. And either way, you're in for a torturous night's sleep. And then they're like, yeah, Theseus finally got the guy who runs that crappy in.

It is hard to tell exactly what tone to take this story in. Like, is it supposed to be funny or is it supposed to be horrifying?

I think it. at least in the versions that have survived, I think it's supposed to be horrifying because that's what Felton mostly touches on here. She points out that Procrustes is the most like a modern serial killer among the six. She argues that, okay, he uses weapons or tools and his method of killing is, quote, detailed, torturous, ritualistic, and personal.

He's also manipulative. He seems to set a trap based on the rights of hospitality and then, of course, viciously betrays those rights. Yeah. And it's elaborate and over the top, which, again, maybe doesn't fit the real life serial murders, but certainly fits that kind of overly theatrical, you know, Hannibal TV series sort of serial killer, you know, where there's some sort of like crazy scheme they're doing. And it has to be this way. It has to be killing people in a weird torture bed.

It's like a jigsaw trap.

Yeah, or jigsaw. I think jigsaw is another great example here. Like, wow, you really put a lot of thought into this one, and we're going to follow this one through to the end. All right, so at this point, Theseus is in the clear. He's killed all six bandits, all six evildoers, all six slashers, and gets to enter Athens. But as we mentioned earlier, there's at least one telling where after he slays Cenus, he has to ritually purify himself before he can keep going.

But in other tellings, he has to ritually purify himself after killing all six before he can enter Athens itself. And I found this very interesting because it's like Theseus has set out into the ungoverned wild lands here. He has tangled with murderers, with evildoers, and in doing so has bloodied himself. He has become less pure because he has had to enact the signature murder of each murderer in order to take them out. And by the time he reaches Athens, it's like he's more seasoned now. He has bloodied his sword, but he's also bloodied his soul to some extent. And so he has to cleanse himself of that in order to re-enter civil society and be a part of the city-state once more.

Yeah, it's interesting because, at least as I read it, I don't sense a lot of doubt or regret in theseus about this kind of stuff it's not like there are passages where he's like you know deeply troubled in his soul that he's having to do this violence it seems like he's he's very resolute and this is you know there is a view that this is just the right thing to do to kill all these killers and i'm going to do it and prove my worth uh so there's one sense in which it's very straightforward like that and you don't see a lot of explicit acknowledgement of of uh of doubt or regret or or feelings of impurity like that. But on the other hand, it is notable that he has to become like the killers.

He can't even just fight them off. He uses their own methods of murder back against them, which really does thematically suggest there's some element of him becoming like them. Like he has to, he has to change somehow. He's doing, something is happening in him because it's one thing to, you know, when we see, uh, heroes triumph over villains in our storytelling today, it is not normal for the heroes to inflict violent, torturous mutilation on the killers. But like it says, that's what he does to Procrustes. Yeah.

Even though, you know, you get the sense Procrustes deserved it in some sense, he, that's what he was doing to innocent people all these years, but it still doesn't feel at least in our modern sensibilities, like that's what a hero should do. But in this case, that's how the story works. So it's like you've got to sort of become a serial killer to beat the serial killers.

Yeah, I mean, we can think of so many situations where we go to great lengths to keep our heroes pure. Where they do the thing where it's like, okay, villain, I'm going to let you go with a warning. And then villain comes with going to do a pot shot or a tricky shoot in the back kind of a thing. And then that forces the hero to kill them. But, you know, you go to great lengths to prevent your hero from killing people in cold blood, much less torturing them to death. Um, but, uh, but as Felton points out, you know, this idea of becoming a killer to hunt a killer, like we see that in a lot of our, our, um, you know, our more contemporary, uh, serial killer media, like Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Um, and of course the Michael

Mann adaptation, Manhunter. Um, she also brings up, uh, Dexter as a possible comparison, though does point out that like with Dexter, you have a serial murderer who, um, kills other serial murderers so as to safely follow his impulses. That's not what we see with Theseus. Theseus isn't killing for kicks here. This is a nobler mission.

Yeah, that's true. And I would say another difference is that even in Red Dragon, the character who has to get in the mind of serial killers in order to defeat them That's for investigative purposes. Like he has to get in the mind of the serial killer to figure out who the serial killer is and how to find and stop them. It's not like, oh, we already know who this person is and know exactly where they are.

And you've just got to act like them once you meet them, you know?

Yeah.

It did remind me, though, once more of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, specifically TCM2. Yes. Stretch. Yeah. Stretch played by Caroline Williams. At the end of that, she has battled her way through the Sawyer family. Chainsaw in hand. And I think the coolest shot in the whole film emerges on the top of this mountain. This kind of man-made structure. And she brandishes the chainsaw on high. And she's covered with blood.

And she emits a primal scream. But it's like she's almost become... a member of the Sawyer family in vanquishing the Sawyer family. And so she feels unfit to return to Athens or Dallas-Fort Worth or whatever the case may be.

Yeah, she's holding the chainsaw up in the air, having beaten the chainsaw wielders. I'm the club man now, yeah. But she absolutely has elements of that. That's good.

And there are probably some other examples of that as well that I'm not thinking of, but that's the one that sticks in my head for sure. Oh, man. Yeah.

TCM2 is pretty great. Really burned my beans.

You know, it reminded me of this in another way. We were chatting about this in the notes a bit, about whether Theseus is kind of like the ultimate final girl. But he reminds me a lot of Lefty in TCM2, the Dennis Hopper character. He is the hero who is setting out into the rural wildlands in order to hunt down the killers.

Well, maybe that should go ahead and pull us into the last thing I wanted to talk about here, which was looking at some major thematic features of modern slasher movies to see if there's any interesting overlap or interaction with the Theseus tale. I think, really, in most cases, it's pretty different, but there are some kind of interesting little overlaps. One thing I was thinking about was the punishment of taboos. It's been widely observed by you know, casual viewers and film scholars alike, that the victims in slasher movies are often teenagers and young adults who engage in socially prohibited behaviors like partaking in drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex. This is famously observed in Scream. You know,

these movies, especially the early movies in the slasher genre from the 1980s, imply this causal relationship between taboo breaking and death. So you have characters who sin, and then immediately afterward, they are isolated and murdered by the villain or the monster, as if they're being punished. And I think this has come up on the show plenty of times before, and I think it's an interesting thing because the unspoken implication of sin and punishment is a major part of the feeling of these movies, even though I think often the people who enjoy these movies would not share the explicit belief that these are behaviors that need to be punished with death. It's kind of interesting. It's just like, it's just part somehow of what the genre

is and how it's enjoyed, even though people don't necessarily think that, you know, like underage drinking should end in punishment. But anyway, does this have any relevance to these, uh, these killers in the Theseus story? thinking about it and not really at least in part because the television of the story available to us do not focus much on the previous victims of the Greek slashers. Like, we don't see them at work on other victims before Theseus, and we only get the barest descriptions of what they did to these other people. And then once Theseus arrives, he is the opposite of a sinful victim who is implicitly punished for his crimes. Rather, he is the hero and he does the punishing. He kills the slashers for their crimes.

Yeah, he's righteous. Or at least you could say he's righteous or he is more than willing to get his hands dirty and give it right back to the killer. So the general idea seems to be that these evildoers are preying on innocents. in a sense, like you, the intended reader in ancient Greece. Because again, if this is really, in large part, if this is like playing on general anxieties about travel in the ancient world, then, you know, that's the intended reader, the intended listener to the tale.

That's the person who is going to imagine themselves becoming the victim here.

The one variation on this where I did see a possible connection is that you might be able to see Punishment for the violation of social taboos going in the other direction. So apart from the fact that they kill people, the Greek slashers here do cross some other important cultural lines. And one that seems obvious to me, you pointed this out earlier in the episode, Rob, is the violation of what was known as Xenia, the Greek concept of ritual hospitality and guest friendships. And so you can see that some of these killers, especially Procrustes, explicitly violates that kind of social expectation. So in some tellings, Procrustes offers hospitality to his victims. There are people traveling on the road,

says he has a house by the road. He invites them into his house as a host. So they're supposed to be protected guests. And custom dictates that when you have a guest at your house, you should ensure their safety. You're supposed to offer them a meal. There are all kinds of kind of steps here for how you treat a guest well and for how guests are also supposed to treat their hosts well. But instead of this, he kills them. He betrays his guests. And this seems, based on what I've read, like a profound cultural taboo violation.

And he is punished for it by Theseus. So it's kind of like the punishment that we see in slasher movies, but it's going the other way. We see the slasher themselves being punished for something that they do wrong that violates cultural expectations apart from just the general violence they commit.

To quote the dad in Troll 2, you can't piss on hospitality.

That's right. Yeah. Orthesius will kill you and he'll pee right back on you. Yeah.

Yeah.

As far as my other notes on this, yeah, I briefly had a thing about the final girl. You know, of course, while in slasher movies we see the sinful characters get punished, there is usually one female character among all the others who is virtuous and intelligent. She alone is able to keep her wits about her, survive the killer's attack, and then unmask and defeat the killer in the end. Is Theseus a six-time final girl character? Uh, yeah, kind of like we do get this description of that, like it is something about Theseus's virtue, which allows him to prevail over the killers. There's something that makes him special and different that allows him to win. And that's often the sense we get about the final girl in

the slasher movie is that like, she's special, she's different. She's better than all of the other people who are the victims.

But she's also transformed by her circumstances into becoming this, this hair, this hero. Whereas Theseus has been he's been idolizing Heracles the whole time. He's like, get me out there. There's some skull crushers and some and some bandits and some evildoers out there. And I want a piece of them. So he's he's he's been waiting for this.

Yeah, that's a very good point. A lot of the academic literature on the final girl is about transformation, like going from becoming a kind of unassuming or modest person to a person of action who. has to fight in the end.

Yeah. And like we were saying, you know, there are no masks. If we're looking at the Greek idea of the mask as a way of transforming the theater or ritual, like nobody in these stories is transforming. Theseus is already everything that he is. And these villains are all, you know, they're out and awful in their own way. And yeah, so nobody's hiding.

Who they are.

They're just doing what they do. I mean, they are hiding who they are in the sense that there is deception Yes, I.

Was going to say that. So there are no masks, there's no face to hide, but they are engaging in trickery. Maybe not all of them, but like, I think, you know, Paraphetes, I think he just walks up to you and kills you with the club. So they're not all engaged. He's honest, at least. you do get the feeling that they in, they approach people with false, with pretenses, you know, they, they approach like a, certainly Procrustes says, you know, I'm going to be a good host. You come to my house, you stay here in the bed, you'll, you'll be safe for the night. And then he cuts you apart. Uh, so that's not exactly the same as a mask, but they are hiding their intentions and feigning harmlessness on, on

first encounter, which seems to, it has some overlap there. And that's a big part of a lot of slasher movies. do derive a lot of their horror, actually, from ambiguous situations. Like, even in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, before the chainsaws come out, there are just a number of creepy, unpleasant, ambiguous encounters with people who you can't quite tell how dangerous they are. And, yeah, so I think the same thing is going on here.

What do you think about Circeon, though? Is he approaching with false... Is he approaching, like, let's have a friendly wrestling match, and then he just surprises you by killing you with the wrestling? Or is it clear from the beginning that this wrestling match is going to be to the death?

That is a good point. I didn't think about this as much, but of course we have other stories from antiquity where what is thought to be an honorable wrestling match ends in assassination. And so that does seem to be an existent trope of the time. So that could be the case, yeah, where it's like, hey, Because I think in these tellings, when he comes at you, you're given the chance. He's like, hey, you can either wrestle me or you're going to be murdered. So, of course, you're going to choose the wrestling. And wrestling has rules.

I mean, there are things you're allowed to do and things you're not to do. He's not challenging you to just an eye-gouging battle to the death. It would seem like there maybe is some idea that there are going to be rules involved. And then he goes for the kill. So, yeah, I think that's a good point. There may be a betrayal of norms and laws here as well. But we're in a land of no laws, where even wrestling has no rules, I guess. No refs.

Okay, that's all I've got.

All right. Well, there you have it. Theseus and the slashers from hell. These were not labors that I knew a lot about until I was digging around and honestly getting into some of Felton's work and kind of discovered these for my own part. And I thought they were fascinating. And again, I think if anyone out there is like, yeah, I need something from Greek mythology. I want to adapt it into a comic book or a movie or some sort of a work of horror fiction. Consider this. There might be something there. Something that could be expanded on and explored. Put it in a contemporary setting or throw some contemporary ideas back into an historic setting. I think there's some material there. Totally.

Oh, wait, should we do casting now? Who are we thinking of? Which one should George Eastman have played? I know we've missed that chance, but.

Ooh, I think, yeah, Cerseion, the wrestler for sure.

The wrestler king, yeah.

Though he could have played the club man as well. Yeah, there's room here for, you know, some of your typical types of horror players, you know, the. The more direct physical threats and then the more sinister, creepy, and deceptive types. Yeah, there's some fun here. And then, of course, we want a big puppet for the boar, of course. Oh, yeah.

Let's see. Procrustes. Who's the person offering the false hospitality?

Yeah, I'm not sure offhand. I mean, false hospitality. You need somebody that can really... play both types who can really uh you know twist it um who can be believable as a gentle host but then become this monstrous killer i.

Feel like john saxon's got to be one of these right.

Yeah yeah yeah saxon could have you know i'm also now that we're talking about like what it entails i'm reminded of uh the 2022 movie the menu with ralph fines uh playing the um the guy who runs the high star, three Michelin star restaurant. He's not cutting people's feet off, but he is murdering everybody. So he's engaging in a betrayal of the trust that you give to a restaurant and to a head chef. Um, but, uh, but then again, I guess he's kind of in general kind of cold on both sides. Um, whereas maybe what you need here is someone who's outwardly warm, but then they reveal their true face.

Barbara Steele is Fia. I know we're mixing up our time period.

Yeah. All's fair in, um, in the fan casting of things like this. You can just pull from whenever. Because inevitably, yeah, you're going to have to, you're going to be drawn from some actors who are no longer young enough for the roles or no longer alive. Shouldn't stop you.

Okay, that's all I've got.

All right, we'll go ahead and close it out there. But we'd love to hear from anyone out there if you have thoughts on the myth itself or some of the horror films, slasher movie comparisons that we've made here. Write in. We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Theseus and the Slashers from Hell

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