The offspring of a queen's cursed passion for a white bull
Poseidon sent the bull for sacrifice; Minos kept it, and the god punished his wife instead
Myth · Greek
Minotaur
Greek mythology — monster of Crete
The bull-headed man kept at the centre of the labyrinth at Knossos, born to Minos's queen Pasiphaë after Poseidon cursed her with desire for a white bull. Athens sent seven youths and seven maidens as tribute to be devoured, until Theseus volunteered, killed the creature and found his way out with Ariadne's thread. Its proper name was Asterius, "the starry one".
How to spot them
- ▸A bull's head on a man's body, cornered at the heart of a maze
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Knossos', 'Pasiphaë', 'seven youths and seven maidens', 'Asterius'
- ▸Its name simply means 'the bull of Minos'
- ▸Dante puts it on guard at the entrance to the circle of the violent
Stories & episodes
Kept at the centre of a maze built by an exiled Athenian craftsman
Daedalus's labyrinth at Knossos, designed so nothing inside could find its way out
Fed on seven youths and seven maidens sent as tribute from Athens
The price Minos exacted after his son Androgeos was killed in Attica
Killed by a volunteer among the tribute victims who followed a thread back out
Theseus, helped by Ariadne and, behind her, by the maze's own architect
Its proper name meant 'the starry one'
Asterius or Asterion, also the name of the Cretan king who raised Minos
Dante sets it snarling at the edge of the seventh circle of Hell
Inferno XII, guarding the violent as a figure of bestial rage
Picasso made it his alter ego through the 1930s
The Vollard Suite etchings and the great 1935 print of a blinded bull-man
Quick-fire facts
- •Its mother was Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and daughter of the sun-god Helios
- •Daedalus built her the wooden cow that made the conception possible
- •The tribute is variously given as annual, or every nine years
- •Arthur Evans, excavating Knossos from 1900, linked the palace's plan and its bull imagery to the legend
- •Labrys, the Cretan double axe, is one proposed origin for the word 'labyrinth'
- •Minoan frescoes show bull-leaping, which may lie behind the tribute story
- •Borges retold it from the monster's point of view in 'The House of Asterion'
- •In the Roman poets the creature is 'semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem' — half bull-man, half man-bull
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Sources
- Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — The Minotaur
- Apollodorus — The Library (Bibliotheca) Book 3.1 and Epitome 1 for the birth, the labyrinth and the tribute