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In Greek
mythology, the Minotaur (Greek: Μῑνώταυρος, Latin: Minotaurus, Etruscan Θevrumineś),
as the Greeks imagined him, was
a creature with the head of a bull on the body of a man or, as described by Ovid, "part man and part
bull". He dwelt at the
center of the Cretan
Labyrinth, which was an elaborate
maze-like construction built for King Minos of Crete and designed by the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus who were ordered to build it to hold the
Minotaur. The Minotaur was eventually killed by Theseus. Theseus was the son of Aethra, and fathered by both Poseidon and Aegeus.
The term Minotaur derives from the Greek
Μῑνώταυρος, etymologically
compounding the name Μίνως (Minos)
and the noun ταύρος "bull", translating as "(the) Bull of Minos".
In Crete, the Minotaur was known by its proper name, Asterion, a name shared with
Minos' foster-father After he ascended the throne of Crete, Minos struggled with his brothers for
the right to rule. Minos prayed to Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull, as a sign of
approval. He was to sacrifice the bull in honor of Poseidon but decided to keep
it instead because of its beauty. To punish Minos, Aphrodite (Venus) made Pasiphaë, Minos' wife, fall madly
in love with the bull from the sea, the Cretan Bull. She had Daedalus,
the famous architect, make a wooden cow for her. Pasiphaë climbed into the bait
in order to copulate with the white bull. The offspring of their
coupling was a monster called the Minotaur. Pasiphaë nursed him in his infancy,
but he grew and became ferocious; being the unnatural offspring of man and
beast, he had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured man for
sustenance. Minos, after getting advice from the Oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to
hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos' palace in Knossos.
Nowhere has the essence of the myth been expressed more succinctly than in
the Heroides attributed to Ovid, where Pasiphaë's daughter complains of
the curse of her unrequited love: "the bull's form disguised the god, Pasiphaë,
my mother, a victim of the deluded bull, brought forth in travail her reproach
and burden." Literalist and
prurient readings that emphasize the machinery of actual copulation may, perhaps
intentionally, obscure the mystic marriage of the god in bull form, a
Minoan mythos alien to the Greeks.
The Minotaur is commonly represented in Classical art with the body of a man
and the head and tail of a bull. One of the figurations assumed by the river god Achelous in wooing Deianira is as a man with the head of a bull,
according to Sophocles'
Trachiniai.
From Classical times through the Renaissance, the Minotaur appears at the
center of many depictions of the Labyrinth. Ovid's Latin account
of the Minotaur, which did not elaborate on which half was bull and which half
man, was the most widely available during the Middle Ages, and several later
versions show the reverse of the Classical configuration: a man's head and torso
on a bull's body, reminiscent of a centaur. This alternative
tradition survived into the Renaissance, and still figures in some modern
depictions, such as Steele Savage's illustrations for Edith Hamilton's Mythology (1942).
Androgeus, son of Minos, had
been killed by the Athenians, who were
jealous of the victories he had won at the Panathenaic festival. Others say he was
killed at Marathon
by the Cretan
bull, his mother's former taurine lover, which Aegeus, king of Athens, had commanded him to slay. The
common tradition is that Minos waged war to avenge the death of his son, and
won. Catullus, in his account of the
Minotaur's birth, refers to another
version in which Athens was "compelled by the cruel plague to pay penalties for
the killing of Androgeos." Aegeus must avert the plague caused by his crime by
sending "young men at the same time as the best of unwed girls as a feast" to
the Minotaur. Minos required that seven Athenian youths and seven maidens, drawn
by lots, be sent every ninth year (some accounts say every year) to be devoured by
the Minotaur.
When the third sacrifice approached, Theseus volunteered to slay the monster. He promised to
his father, Aegeus, that he would put up a white sail on his journey back home
if he was successful and would have the crew put up black sails if he was
killed. In Crete, Ariadne, the
daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and helped him navigate the
labyrinth, which had a single path to the center. In most accounts she gave him
a ball of thread, allowing him to retrace his path. Theseus killed the Minotaur
with the sword of Aegeus and led the other Athenians back out of the labyrinth.
But he forgot to put up the white sail, so when his father saw the ship he
presumed Theseus was dead and threw himself into the sea, thus committing
suicide.
This essentially Athenian view of the Minotaur as the antagonist of Theseus
reflects the literary sources, which are biased in favour of Athenian
perspectives. The Etruscans, who paired Ariadne with Dionysus, never with
Theseus, offered an alternative Etruscan view of the Minotaur, never seen in
Greek arts: on an Etruscan red-figure wine-cup of the early-to-mid fourth
century Pasiphaë tenderly dandles an infant Minotaur on her knee.
The contest between Theseus and the Minotaur was frequently represented in Greek art. A Knossian didrachm exhibits on one
side the labyrinth, on the other the Minotaur surrounded by a semicircle of
small balls, probably intended for stars; one of the monster's names was Asterion ("star").
The ruins of Minos' palace at Knossos have been found, but the labyrinth has
not. The enormous number of rooms, staircases and corridors in the palace has
led some archaeologists to suggest that the palace itself was the source of the
labyrinth myth, an idea generally discredited today. Homer, describing the shield of Achilles, remarked that the
labyrinth was Ariadne's ceremonial
dancing ground.
Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a
Minoan adaptation of the Baal-Moloch of the
Phoenicians. The slaying of the
Minotaur by Theseus in that case indicates the breaking of Athenian tributary
relations with Minoan Crete.
According to A. B. Cook, Minos and
Minotaur are only different forms of the same personage, representing the
sun-god of the Cretans, who
depicted the sun as a bull. He and J. G. Frazer both explain Pasiphae's union
with the bull as a sacred ceremony, at which the queen of Knossos was wedded to
a bull-formed god, just as the wife of the Tyrant in Athens was wedded to Dionysus. E. Pottier, who does not dispute the
historical personality of Minos, in view of the story of Phalaris, considers it probable that in Crete (where a
bull-cult may have existed by the side of that of the labrys) victims were tortured by being shut up in the
belly of a red-hot brazen
bull. The story of Talos, the Cretan
man of brass, who heated himself red-hot
and clasped strangers in his embrace as soon as they landed on the island, is
probably of similar origin.
A historical explanation of the myth refers to the time when Crete was the
main political and cultural potency in the Aegean Sea. As the fledgling Athens
(and probably other continental Greek cities) was under tribute to Crete, it can
be assumed that such tribute included young men and women for sacrifice. This
ceremony was performed by a priest disguised with a bull head or mask, thus
explaining the imagery of the Minotaur. It may also be that this priest was son
to Minos.
Once continental Greece was free from Crete's dominance, the myth of the
Minotaur worked to distance the forming religious consciousness of the Hellene
poleis from Minoan beliefs.
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