Then she sighed, and said the same words again, and went down, and came again the next year; but Theseus could not lift the stone then, nor the year after; and he longed to ask his mother the meaning of that stone, and what might lie underneath it; but her face was so sad that he had not the heart to ask. So he said to himself, ‘The day shall surely come when I will lift that stone, though no man in Troezene can.’ And in order to grow strong he spent all his days in wrestling, and boxing, and hurling, and taming horses, and hunting the boar and the bull, and coursing goats and deer among the rocks; till upon all the mountains there was no hunter so swift as Theseus; and he killed Phaia the wild sow of Crommyon, which wasted all the land; till all the people said, ‘Surely the Gods are with the lad.’ And when his eighteenth year was past, Aithra led him up again to the temple, and said, ‘Theseus, lift the stone this day, or never know who you are.’ And Theseus went into the thicket, and stood over the stone, and tugged at it; and it moved. Then his spirit swelled within him, and he said, ‘If I break my heart in my body, it shall up.’ And he tugged at it once more, and lifted it, and rolled it over with a shout. And when he looked beneath it, on the ground lay a sword of bronze, with a hilt of glittering gold, and by it a pair of golden sandals; and he caught them up, and burst through the bushes like a wild boar, and leapt to his mother, holding them high above his head. But when she saw them she wept long in silence, hiding her fair face in her shawl; and Theseus stood by her wondering, and wept also, he knew not why. And when she was tired of weeping, she lifted up her head, and laid her finger on her lips, and said, ‘Hide them in your bosom, Theseus my son, and come with me where we can look down upon the sea.’ Then they went outside the sacred wall, and looked down over the bright blue sea; and Aithra said— ‘Do you see this land at our feet?’ And he said, ‘Yes; this is Troezene, where I was born and bred.’ And she said, ‘It is but a little land, barren and rocky, and looks towards the bleak north-east. Do you see that land beyond?’ ‘Yes; that is Attica, where the Athenian people dwell.’ [Picture: Theseus and Aithra]