Minotaur / Minotaur
Half-man, half-bull monster of the Labyrinth
The Minotaur is the monster at the heart of the Labyrinth on Crete: a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull, fed on young men and women sent from Athens. He was slain by the hero Theseus, with the help of a ball of thread and a princess in love.
How they were born
King Minos of Crete asked Poseidon for a sign that he should rule, and Poseidon sent a magnificent white bull from the sea, expecting Minos to sacrifice it. Minos kept the beautiful bull for himself and sacrificed another instead. In revenge, Poseidon — or in some versions Aphrodite — made Minos's wife Pasiphae fall in love with the white bull. The great inventor Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow, and Pasiphae hid inside it so she could approach the bull. From this union was born the Minotaur, a creature with a man's body and a bull's head. Minos named him Asterion, meaning 'starry one', after his own stepfather, but everyone else called him the Minotaur, 'the bull of Minos'.
The greatest stories
The White Bull and Pasiphae
When Minos became king of Crete, he prayed to Poseidon to send him a sign from the sea to prove the gods favoured him. A snow-white bull rose from the waves, more beautiful than any bull on earth, and Minos promised to sacrifice it to Poseidon. But the bull was so splendid that Minos could not bear to kill it, so he kept it in his herds and sacrificed a lesser bull instead. Poseidon was insulted and punished the king through his queen: Pasiphae was seized with a violent love for the white bull. Daedalus, the cleverest craftsman alive, built a wooden cow covered in real cowhide, and Pasiphae climbed inside. The bull approached, and in time the queen gave birth to a monster — half man, half bull — that no one could bear to look at.
The Labyrinth
The Minotaur grew wild and dangerous, eating human flesh, and Minos could not keep him in any ordinary pen. He called on Daedalus, the same inventor who had built the wooden cow, and ordered him to build a prison no one could ever escape: the Labyrinth. Daedalus designed a maze of twisting passages, blind turnings and dead ends so confusing that anyone who entered would wander until they starved, or until the Minotaur found them. The Labyrinth was built under the palace at Knossos, and the Minotaur was shut inside it in the dark. Daedalus himself barely escaped his own maze, and the secret of its paths was known to no one but him.
The Athenian Tribute
Minos's son Androgeus had been killed in Athens, and in revenge Minos made war on the city and forced it to pay a terrible tribute. Every nine years — in some tellings every year — Athens had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete. The youths were drawn by lot, and their families mourned them as if they were already dead, because they were led into the Labyrinth to be eaten by the Minotaur. For years the black-sailed ship carried its cargo of frightened young Athenians across the sea, and no one came back. The tribute became a symbol of Athens's shame, and the city waited for a hero strong and brave enough to end it.
Theseus and Ariadne's Thread
When the third tribute was due, the young prince Theseus volunteered to sail to Crete as one of the fourteen, vowing to kill the Minotaur and end the tribute forever. In Crete, King Minos's daughter Ariadne fell in love with him at first sight. She gave him two gifts: a sword, hidden in his clothes, and a ball of thread. Theseus tied one end of the thread to the door of the Labyrinth and unwound it as he walked deeper into the dark maze. At its centre he found the Minotaur and fought it — with his bare hands, or with the sword, depending on the telling — and killed it. Then he followed the thread back out through the winding passages, led the other Athenians to freedom, and sailed home with Ariadne. The tribute was over, but Theseus forgot to change his ship's black sails for white ones, the signal of success, and his father Aegeus, believing his son dead, threw himself into the sea.
Family & connections
Symbol, animal & weapon
Fun facts
- The Minotaur's real name was Asterion, meaning 'starry one' — 'Minotaur' is just a nickname meaning 'the bull of Minos'.
- The Labyrinth was so confusing that even Daedalus, who designed it, barely escaped it himself after it was finished.
- The word 'labyrinth' may come from the double-headed axe, the labrys, which was a sacred symbol in Minoan Crete and appears in the palace of Knossos.
- The palace of Knossos on Crete, excavated in the early 1900s, really does have a maze-like layout of hundreds of rooms and corridors, and may have inspired the legend of the Labyrinth.
- Ariadne's thread is still used as a metaphor today: in science and computing, an 'Ariadne's thread' is a way of solving a maze or tracing a path through a complex problem.
Gallery — sculpture & art
