Plutarch, a Greek writer from Chaeronea in what is now central Greece, composed Parallel Lives around the turn of the second century AD. The series pairs Greek and Roman biographies as moral mirrors. This volume is Theseus, the man Athens claimed as its founder, set opposite Romulus, Rome's legendary first king.

A boy from Troezen, a town on the coast south of Athens, lifts a sword from under a rock, walks the bandit road to Athens, and sails to Crete as human tribute. There he kills the Minotaur — the bull-headed beast in the Labyrinth — and escapes on Ariadne's thread. He forgot to hoist the white sail. His father saw the black one and threw himself into the sea that still bears his name. Theseus unified Attica, the land around Athens, stole Helen as a girl, failed in the underworld, and died in exile, shoved from a cliff.