The first stop on my Wikipedia tour familiarised me straight away with a major difficulty faced by any online search-based encyclopedia, namely alternative spellings. This is a particular problem for words originating from other writing systems. Troizen presented me with a classic example of this difficulty.

The Troizen article, depicting in a very brief fashion a city in ancient Greece, looked ripe for fleshing out - surely there was more relevent information available on this city. Googling the city's name brought up a few articles but not as much as expected. I suspected there was more to this than met the eye. I discovered the problem when I came across a page which mentioned an alternative spelling - Troezen. Searching for this name provided much richer rewards.

The plot thickened when I punched 'Troezen' back into Wikipedia. A separate, slightly more detailed, article appeared on exactly the same subject. Some work was required here to improve the integrity of the encyclopedia.

After searching through some FAQ's I found out what I needed to do. I copied over the text from the Troizen article to the Troezen one, and then put in a redirect tag on "Troizen" so that anyone entering this name would be sent to the master "Troezen" article. All that was then required was a quick integration of the two texts into a new temporary one which would be in place until I could establish whether any further detail would be required. Searching some sources soon indicated that more could certainly be added to good effect.

Although the city, now known as Trizina, exists in modern Greece, its greatest stories are those of myth, of the interwoven fate of men and gods and the heroes which span the chasm between them. Troezen is best known as the birthplace of Theseus, one of the greatest of such heroes. As is common for Greek heroes, he was the offspring of three parents. His mother Aethra had sex with Aegeus, king of Athens, and Poseidon, god of the sea, on the same night. The mix of the seed of a great man and a god created the hero Theseus.

The story of Aegeus leaving his sword and sandals under a huge rock which only Theseus was able to move has perhaps more than just a coincidental resonance with the Arthurian legends of the sword in the stone. In fact, there are a number of such miraculous sword retrieval myths in dark age culture, and it raises the question of whether this particular ancient myth was the root of these traditions.

The story of Hippolytus and Phaedra was not new to me. I saw a terrific performance of Racine's version of the Euripedes play, Phaedra, at London's Old Vic in 1984 with Glenda Jackson playing Phaedra but did not remember the place where it was set. The story again shows the influence of Pegasus upon the events of man, as Theseus invokes his father to kill his (Pegasus's)grandson. The fact that Hippolytus was innocent of the crimes he was accused of shows that Greek gods were far from infallible or omniscient.

Troezen's role in the Battle of Salamis is also intriguing, particularly the recent discovery of the stele depicting the order from Themistocles to evacuate the Athenian women and children to Troezen. The fact that it appears that this was neither original nor a fake, but instead a commemorative plaque created 200 years after the event it describes gives an interesting insight into the civic pride of ancient societies and their need to display this publicly in a similar manner to our modern war memorials and other commemorative monuments.