Minotaur

Minos was disputing the throne of Crete and asked Poseidon for a sign: that he send a bull up out of the sea, promising to sacrifice it the moment it appeared. The god sent a splendid animal and Minos won the kingdom, but he put the bull among his herds and sacrificed a poorer one in its place (Apollodorus, Library 3.1.3). The revenge did not fall on him. Poseidon made the animal savage and contrived that Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos, should fall in love with it. Daedalus, the Athenian craftsman taking refuge at the Cretan court, built a wooden cow on wheels, hollowed it out, covered it with the hide of a flayed cow and left it in the meadow where the bull grazed; Pasiphaë got inside (Apollodorus 3.1.4; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4.77.1-3; Hyginus, Fabulae 40). From that union the creature was born. His proper name was Asterion, and the nickname by which he went down in history, Minotaur, simply means «the bull of Minos»: it is not a name, it is an owner's label.

Minos commissioned Daedalus to build something no one could get out of, and there he shut up and guarded the creature (Apollodorus 3.1.4). Ovid describes the work with an architect's precision: Daedalus «confuses the marks and leads the eye astray through the winding of diverse paths» (Metamorphoses 8.159-161). The food for that confinement came from Athens. When Androgeos, son of Minos, died on Attic soil, the Cretan king made war on the city and imposed on it the sending of unarmed young people as fodder for the Minotaur (Apollodorus 3.15.8). Here the sources part ways, and it is best not to hide it: Apollodorus and Hyginus say the tribute was ANNUAL (Apollodorus 3.15.8, seven youths and seven maidens; Hyginus, Fabulae 41, seven children with no sex specified), whereas Plutarch, Ovid and Diodorus make it EVERY NINE YEARS (Plutarch, Theseus 15.1; Ovid 8.171, «the third lot repeated at nine years»; Diodorus 4.61.3). They do agree that Theseus came with the third consignment. From the real palace come the two emblems that usually accompany him as well: the double-bladed axe, the labrys, which the masons incised into the walls and pillars of Knossos and from whose name the word labyrinth itself has been derived, and the stylised limestone bull's horns that crowned roofs and shrines.

The usual image is of a man with a bull's head, and it has ancient backing, though not unanimous. Hyginus is the most explicit: she bore the Minotaur «with a bull's head and the lower part human» (Fabulae 40). Apollodorus agrees: «he had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human» (3.1.4). Diodorus puts the join higher: of double form, «the upper parts of the body as far as the shoulders those of a bull and the rest those of a man» (4.77.3). Ovid, by contrast, deliberately refuses to divide anything: he speaks of «the strangeness of the two-formed monster» and of «the twin figure of bull and youth» (Metamorphoses 8.156 and 8.169), never saying which half is which, and in the Art of Love he plays on the ambiguity to the point of a pun: «a man half-ox and an ox half-man». And Pausanias, who walked Greece looking at statues, avoids the word Minotaur and always writes «the so-called Bull of Minos» (1.24.1; 3.18.11 and 3.18.16).

Theseus was numbered among those of the third tribute, or offered himself voluntarily according to others (Apollodorus, Epitome 1.7). Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with him and gave him the thread, after asking Daedalus to disclose the way out (Epitome 1.8; Plutarch, Theseus 19.1). What follows is told by the sources with striking sobriety. Apollodorus: «having found the Minotaur in the last part of the labyrinth, he killed him by smiting him with his fists; and drawing the clue after him he made his way out again» (Epitome 1.9). No sword, no duel, no last words. Hyginus sums it up just as fast: he went in, killed him and got out by unwinding the thread on Ariadne's advice (Fabulae 42); in another fable he gives the place, «he killed the Minotaur in the town of Cnossus» (Fabulae 38). Ovid, who had given the Labyrinth twenty lines, dispatches the death in a single verb, domuit, «he tamed him», and the subject of that clause is not Theseus but «the third lot»: he names neither the hero nor Ariadne at the moment of the deed (Metamorphoses 8.169-174).

Scepticism about the monster is not modern: it was already in the sources themselves. Plutarch records that the Cretans denied the story and maintained, on the authority of Philochorus, that the Labyrinth was nothing but a prison from which there was no getting out; that Minos instituted funeral games in honour of Androgeos and gave as prizes the Athenian youths, meanwhile held there; and that the victor in those first games was the most powerful man under Minos, his general, named Taurus, who treated the young people with arrogance and cruelty (Theseus 16.1). In that version Theseus asks to enter the lists, beats Taurus at wrestling and disgraces him, and Minos, pleased, gives back the youths and remits the tribute (19.2-3); Demon, on the other hand, had Taurus die in a sea-fight in the harbour (19.2). Pausanias goes further and doubts in his own name: describing on the Acropolis the fight of Theseus with the so-called Bull of Minos, he writes «whether this was a man or a beast of the nature he is said to have been in the accepted story, for even in our time women have given birth to far more extraordinary monsters than this» (1.24.1).