But that fair Ariadne never came to Athens with her husband.  Some say that Theseus left her sleeping on Naxos among the Cyclades; and that Dionusos the wine-king found her, and took her up into the sky, as you shall see some day in a painting of old Titian’s—one of the most glorious pictures upon earth.  And some say that Dionusos drove away Theseus, and took Ariadne from him by force: but however that may be, in his haste or in his grief, Theseus forgot to put up the white sail.  Now Ægeus his father sat and watched on Sunium day after day, and strained his old eyes across the sea to see the ship afar.  And when he saw the black sail, and not the white one, he gave up Theseus for dead, and in his grief he fell into the sea, and died; so it is called the Ægean to this day.  
And now Theseus was king of Athens, and he guarded it and ruled it well.
 
For he killed the bull of Marathon, which had killed Androgeos, Minos’ son; and he drove back the famous Amazons, the warlike women of the East, when they came from Asia, and conquered all Hellas, and broke into Athens itself.  But Theseus stopped them there, and conquered them, and took Hippolute their queen to be his wife.  Then he went out to fight against the Lapithai, and Peirithoos their famous king: but when the two heroes came face to face they loved each other, and embraced, and became noble friends; so that the friendship of Theseus and Peirithoos is a proverb even now.  And he gathered (so the Athenians say) all the of the land together, and knit them into one strong people, while before they were all parted and weak: and many another wise thing he did, so that his people honoured him after he was dead, for many a hundred years, as the father of their freedom and their laws.  And six hundred years after his death, in the famous fight at Marathon, men said that they saw the ghost of Theseus, with his club, fighting in the van of battle against the invading Persians, for the country which he loved.  And twenty years after Marathon his bones (they say) were found in Scuros, an beyond the sea; and they were bigger than the bones of mortal man.  So the Athenian............