Two heroes go down among the dead to fetch a bride, are offered a seat, and one of them never rises from it again. Apollodorus's The Library (Bibliotheca), a Greek mythography compiled in the first or second century CE, recounts how Theseus, in the "endeavour to win Persephone as a bride for Pirithous", went down to Hades at his friend's side and was beguiled there — "on the pretence that they were about to partake of good cheer", Hades, lord of the dead, "bade them first be seated" on what the record names the "Chair of Forgetfulness". The seat was no ordinary furniture: to it "they grew and were held fast by coils of serpents". Pirithous "remained bound for ever", while "Hercules brought Theseus up" and sent him home.

The enchantment lived in the chair itself — a thing that fuses whoever trusts it to sit. Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist who edited and translated the Library, notes in the apparatus that no ancient author but Apollodorus "expressly mentions the Chair of Forgetfulness", though Horace seems to glance at it in "the Lethaean bonds" that held Pirithous fast. Frazer's note keeps a grislier variant from "the old poet Panyasis": the two were not merely pinioned, but the rock itself grew to their flesh and "held them as in a vice", so that when Hercules tore Theseus free he "left a piece of his person adhering to the rock".

A punishment shaped exactly like hospitality — sit, be at ease, and forget you ever meant to leave. What is it about a chair, of all household things, that let the old tellers picture forgetting and captivity as something you simply sit down into?