Theseus was the hero the Athenians claimed as their founder, the one who sailed to Crete, killed the Minotaur deep in the labyrinth, and came home alive to spare his city the tribute of blood it owed the island. In his memory they kept the ship that had carried him back, and they kept it alive. Every year they sent it out again, on a sacred crossing to Delos, and one by one they replaced the planks as they rotted, so that it never lost its readiness to sail, until, over the decades, not a single piece of the original timber remained in the hull.

It was Plutarch, late in the first century, who first set down the question, old already in his own day and still asked in ours, of whether that ship was any longer the ship of Theseus. Much later Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher who spent his life........

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