Theseus

Athens, in the story, owes Crete a tribute of young men and women, sent at intervals to be given to the Minotaur in the labyrinth under the palace at Knossos. Theseus, the king's son, puts himself in the group. In Crete Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, falls in love with him and gives him a thread to unwind as he goes in, which is how anyone finds their way out of a maze. He kills the Minotaur, follows the thread back, and sails.

The rest of it is a sequence of things going wrong. Ariadne is abandoned on Naxos, in some versions because Dionysus claims her and in others for no reason anyone has excused. Theseus had agreed with his father Aegeus to hoist a white sail on the return if he was alive, and he forgets and comes home under black; his father, watching from the cliff, throws himself into the sea that has carried his name ever since.

The tale has the shape of a young man's initiation, and its Cretan setting has attracted archaeological speculation ever since a palace with a complicated ground plan and a great deal of bull imagery was excavated at Knossos. What the excavation shows is a Bronze Age palace culture in which bulls mattered; it does not show a Minotaur, and the atlas records the resonance without converting it into evidence.

What Athenians valued in Theseus was not the Minotaur. It was the synoikismos, the act by which he is said to have dissolved the separate councils and magistracies of the villages of Attica and gathered them into one city with a single government, then invited outsiders in and, in some accounts, resigned much of his own power to the people.

That is a founder narrative built to justify a specific constitution, and Athens curated it accordingly. In the fifth century BCE, on an oracle's instruction, the Athenians located bones on the island of Skyros which they identified as his, brought them home, and built a shrine in the city to house them. He acquired a festival, the Theseia; he appears on the sculpture of public buildings fighting centaurs and Amazons, in scenes that stood for civilisation defeating disorder; and Athenian writers steadily improved him.

The result is a hero doing political work. When a state wants to say that its arrangements are ancient rather than recent, it needs someone to have made them, and Theseus was available. The atlas records both layers: an old Attic hero with the usual monster-killing repertoire, and the deliberate later construction of a democratic founder on top of him, which is the more interesting of the two because the construction can be watched happening.