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to make my own land as civil as the one I had conquered.
    I spared even Deukalion himself, when he asked for mercy. I found him what I had guessed, a puppet who would dance to my tune too: vain, not proud; content to be vassal king and subject ally, in return for the empty show. His wife was like him, lazy and fine, or in Crete she might have been dangerous. As it was, when I heard they were bringing up the little Phaedra, King Minos’ youngest daughter, saved when the Palace burned, I thought no harm to leave her there. I had meant to see her before I left, for she had been a taking child, who had made a hero of me when I was a bull-boy, in the way of such small girls. But there was always too much to do; at the harbor as I was sailing, I bought from a Nubian a cage of little bright birds from Africa, and sent it to her from me.
    On the way home, I put in at Troizen with my uncles and my cousins, to greet my grandfather for the first time since I left his house. He was at the harbor mole waiting to meet me; a tall stooped old warrior, in his state robes. Last time I had seen him so, it was to receive the King of Pylos; and while we waited for the guest, he had sent me off again to comb my hair. That had been four years back, when I was fifteen.
    The youths unyoked the horses and pulled the chariot up through the Eagle Gate, with roseleaves and myrtles falling, and paeans sung. On the Palace steps stood my mother waiting. When we had parted, she had come straight from taking the omens for me at the Mother’s altar; her flounces had clashed with gold, and about her diadem had clung the smell of incense. Now there were ribbons and violets in her hair and her skirts were stitched with flowers; she held in her hand a garland to crown me. Her beauty dazzled me; and then, when I came close to kiss her, I saw the last bloom of her youth was gone.
    After the feast in Hall, my grandfather took me to his upper room. The stool was gone where I used to sit at his feet, and the chair brought in which he kept for kings.
    “So, Theseus,” he said. “High King of Attica, High King of Crete. What now?”
    “High King of Crete, Grandfather, and King of Athens. High King of Attica is a word, no more. That comes next.”
    “The Attic team will be hard to yoke together; ill-matched and rough. As they are now, they will pay your tithes and fight your enemies. That is much, in Attica.”
    Too little. The House of Minos stood for a thousand years, because Crete had one law.”
    “Yet it has fallen.”
    “For want of law enough. It stopped with the serfs and the slaves. Men are dangerous who have nothing left to lose.”
    He raised his brows. It was the look of a grandfather at a boy; but he said no more.
    I said, “The King should have looked after them. Not only to quiet them; they were his charge. Don’t we say all helpless folk—the orphan, the stranger, the suppliant, who have nothing to bargain with and can only pray—are sacred to Zeus the Savior? The King must answer for them; he is next the god. For the serfs, the landless hirelings, the captives of the spear; even the slaves.”
    He was slow to speak. Then he said, “You are your own master now, Theseus, and many men’s beside. But I have lived longer, and this I tell you: nothing is stronger in men than the will to possess their own. Touch it, and you will make enemies who will bide their time. And are you a king to sit quiet at home five years together? Beware of malice at your back.”
    “I will, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to work anyone against the grain. All those customs they brought from their first lands; the little old goddess at the fourways, the village sacrifice, are a home roof to them against the naked wind. I have known exile too. But they live in fear, from chief to pig-boy: of the raider from over the hill, the grinding master whose hired hands sweat all day for the scrapings of the pot, the brawling neighbor who kills the straying sheep and beats the