Also, have you noticed that in myths no one ever ‘jumps off a cliff’ or ‘jumps into the sea?’ They always ‘throw [or hurl] themselves.’

plato vs aristotle and some bertrand russel… or am making another obscure tangent connection?

Given that we who are human lose, each seven years, all our cells, which are replaced by new ones over that period, you might also ask: Are we the same person (people) we were seven years ago?

While you’re at it, let me add another tidbit:

The Athenians preserved the ship of Theseus. But over the years and centuries, its various parts rotted and decayed. So the Athenians replaced one plank here, another plank there. At some point, they began to wonder:

Is a ship that has had all its parts replaced still the same ship? It’s become a famous paradox since.

To recap for the others: Poseidon sent Minos a white bull, expecting Minos to sacrifice the bull to him. Minos did not. In return, Poseidon made Minos’ wife fall in love with the bull. She mated with the bull, and out came the Minotaur.

And Minos = authority.

Your thesis has legs.

After the successful Battle at Salamis (won by the Greeks over the mighty Persians), the strategist and founder, so to speak, of the Athenian Navy, Themistocles, was replaced by a young general, Cimon.

Cimon’s most famous quest was to find and return to Athens the bones of Theseus. According to John Hale, “he [Theseus] was supposed to have died on the island of Skyros, but no one knew his burial place.”

With the help of the Oracle at Delphi, Cimon went to Skyros and saw “an eagle tearing at a mound of earth.”

After digging they did discover “a sarcophagus, a sword, a spear, and a skeleton of a very big man.”

Dr. Hale goes on for two more pages about Theseus. Let me cite, in short version here:

1.A genealogist/mythologist Pherecydes rewrote the Theseus myth.
2. Another mythologist, Demon, changed the myth again. (The minotaur is changed into a general named Taurus).
3.These changes (above) all allude to Theseus’ naval abilities.

I’ll end with another fascinating quotation from the story.

“Other additions to Theseus’ myth enhanced his role in Attica, established the first democratic assembly, encouraged the immigration of resident aliens, and stood as champion to the poor and oppressed, even to slaves. Thus the primeval founder of the city’s sea power also became the originator of Athenian liberty, unity, and democracy.”

About three restaurants ago (I have Perpetual Waiter Syndrome, and I keep getting fired–hence my peculiar way of measuring time) I worked at a little Mediterranean place on Ninth Avenue. We used white napkins. One day, out of the blue, the owner decided that he wanted all black napkins. So from then on it was all black napkins. One day, a few months later, the laudry delivery of black napkins was late, so the busboys set up the dining room with our old white napkins instead. When I arrived for work, the whiteness of these napkins almost knocked me back out onto the sidewalk. Even though, objectively speaking, they weren’t any whiter than they had been prior to the changeover to black, since my eyes had gotten so used to the black ones, the white ones, by contrast, suddenly looked like white to the power of googol. Looking into the dining room was like staring straight into the Sun.

The point being (a) our perceptions are not absolute but are in large measure a function of contrast, and (b) having just become acquainted with Theseus and his sails, I now wonder whether our whilom napkin switcheroos were as innocuous as they appeared at the time. Specifically, I wonder if their were any suspicious suicides within, say, a two-block radius from 52nd and Ninth Ave at the time of our switching to black, then again when we switched back to white, and then back to black again (once the black napkins arrived from the laundry). I’m also curious whether our owner had read the story of Theseus right before ordering the color change, and whose slaughter he may have been trying to signal.

Are these the parts out of which we build all our stories? I suppose so. They’re certainly all in the plot of Clueless: quest, journey, recognition, reunion, etc., including the peak moment where Cher Horowitz gets mugged.