The Bull-headed Monster of the Labyrinth
The Minotaur, 'bull of Minos,' had a man's body and a bull's head; his given name was Asterion. When King Minos of Crete kept back a white bull that Poseidon had sent for sacrifice, the god made Queen Pasiphae desire the animal; the craftsman Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow, and the monster was the result. Minos ordered Daedalus to construct the Labyrinth, a maze of winding, interlocking passages, to confine it.
After Minos's son was killed at Athens, the defeated city was forced to send seven youths and seven maidens every nine years as food for the beast. With the third tribute sailed the Athenian prince Theseus; the Cretan princess Ariadne, who loved him, gave him a ball of thread, which he tied at the Labyrinth's entrance, killed the Minotaur in its depths, and followed the thread back out, fleeing by night with the princess. From 1900 Arthur Evans excavated at Knossos a sprawling Bronze Age palace of stacked rooms and crossing corridors, its walls bearing bull frescoes and double-axe marks, long linked in the popular imagination with the Labyrinth of the tale.
