The Mythology Book

76

HE HAD THE FACE OF

A BULL, BUT THE REST

OF HIM WAS HUMAN

THESEUS AND THE MINOTAUR

T

he island of Crete was at

the heart of the Minoan

civilization that dominated

the Aegean and Mediterranean

world in the 2nd millennium bce.

The Minoans were keen traders

and had a sophisticated culture.

Their rivalry with mainland Greeks

may have been the origin of the

myth of the Minotaur.

Sacrificial tribute

When King Aegeus of Athens had

King Minos’s son, Androgeos,

murdered, the Delphic Oracle

ordered him to atone for the crime.

Every seven years Aegeus had to

send seven of the city’s finest

IN BRIEF

THEME

Man and monster

SOURCES

Life of Theseus, Plutarch, 75 ce;

Library, Pseudo-Apollodorus,

ca.10 0 ce.

SETTING

King Minos’s palace,

Knossos, Crete.

KEY FIGURES

Aegeus King of Athens.

Minos King of Crete; son

of Zeus and Europa.

Pasiphaë Queen of Crete;

wife of Minos.

Poseidon God of the sea.

Minotaur A monster that is

half-man, half-bull.

Daedalus Inventor.

Theseus Son of King Aegeus

and the sea nymph Aethra.

Ariadne Daughter of Minos

and Pasiphaë.

youths and seven of its loveliest

maidens, drawn by lots, to Minos’s

capital of Knossos to be fed to the

Minotaur, a monster that lived in a

complex maze called the Labyrinth.

Half-man, half-bull, the

Minotaur was the son of Minos’s

wife, Pasiphaë, and a white bull

sent to King Minos by Poseidon.

Rather than sacrifice the bull, as

the sea god had intended, King

Minos had kept it for his herd.

Cursing the king, Poseidon had

made Pasiphaë fall in love with the

creature. When the queen, who

disguised herself as a cow in order

to visit the bull, then conceived and

bore the Minotaur, King Minos

ordered Daedalus to build the maze

to hide the monster.

Theseus’s mission

By the time Athens drew lots for

the third sacrifice, King Aegeus’s

son Theseus had come of age.

Determined to kill the Minotaur, he

asked his father if he could join the

sacrificial party bound for Crete. He

promised to change his ship’s sails

from black to white for the return

journey, as a signal of his success.

When Theseus arrived in

Knossos, King Minos’s daughter

Ariadne fell madly in love with him.

Daedalus built a

labyrinth, whose complicated

windings confounded

whoever tried to leave.

Library

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77

Theseus defeats the Minotaur in a

scene on a kylix (drinking cup) from

ca.420 bce. Decorated with Theseus’s

heroic deeds, the cup is signed by the

Greek vase painter Aison.

See also: The many affairs of Zeus 42–47 ■ Apollo and the Oracle of Delphi 58–59 ■ Daedalus and Icarus 76–77 ■

Mithras slays the bull 118–19 ■ The epic of Gilgamesh 190–97

ANCIENT GREECE

She begged Daedalus to help her

lover in his quest. To ensure that

Theseus would find his way out

of the maze, Daedalus gave her

a ball of wool for him to attach at

the entrance to the maze and then

unwind as he went deeper in.

After an epic struggle, he killed the

bull and followed Ariadne’s thread

back to safety.

Hasty exit

With Ariadne at his side, Theseus

set sail for Athens, but Athena

intervened, ordering him to leave

Ariadne on the island of Naxos. In

his distress at abandoning his

lover, Theseus forgot to change the

sail to white. Waiting on a cliff top,

Aegeus saw the black-sailed ship

return and in his grief—believing

his son to be dead—hurled himself

into the sea below. The sea has

been the “Aegean” ever since. ■

The bull

None held the bull in higher

regard than the people who

inhabited Crete for several

centuries during the 2nd

millennium bce. In a sense, King

Minos, the mythical first king

of Crete, was a half-bull like the

Minotaur: his father, Zeus, had

taken the form of a bull to rape

his mother, Europa.

The bull cult was at the

center of Minoan culture: art

depicting bulls abounds in the

palace complex of Knossos,

including one in which athletes

This Minoan rhyton (a carved

libation vessel in the shape of an

animal’s head) from ca.1500 bce was

found in a palace in Knossos.

leap over a bull. Excavated in

the early 20th century by British

archaeologist Arthur Evans, the

palace is the most elaborate of

several such complexes on the

island of Crete. Evans called the

culture “Minoan” on account of

the culture’s obsession with the

bull, and due to the mazelike

architecture of the excavated

royal palace, which Evans

referred to as the Labyrinth.

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