The Cretan Bull

Where the bull came from

The Cretan Bull is a savage bull that the hero Heracles must catch on the island of Crete as one of his labours. Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths, records two stories of where it came from. He does not choose between them.

In the first, it is the bull that carried Europa across the sea to Crete. In the second, it is a bull that the god Poseidon sent to Minos, the king of Crete, to be sacrificed. Minos keeps the bull instead, and Poseidon makes the animal savage.

In a separate passage, Apollodorus takes the second story further. Poseidon also makes Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, desire the bull. She bears a child, Asterius, who is called the Minotaur.

So the labour begins either with an earlier sea crossing to Crete or with a sacrifice that Minos held back. The text records both and leaves the question open.

The capture

In Apollodorus, Minos proposes to help Heracles take the bull. Heracles says no. He catches the animal alone and brings it alive to Eurystheus, the king who set his labours. The capture does not settle which bull it was or why it became dangerous.

The historian Diodorus Siculus tells the meeting another way. In his version, Minos helps Heracles, and Heracles crosses the sea on the bull’s back. This is a separate account, and it does not fill gaps in the one by Apollodorus. One writer makes Heracles act alone. The other gives the Cretan king a part and turns the return into a ride across the sea.

In both accounts, the bull stays alive under Heracles’s control. For Apollodorus, that control is the point of the order, because the bull must reach Eurystheus. Its strength leaves Crete intact. In this it differs from monsters whose deaths complete their labours.

Apollodorus follows the bull after Heracles delivers it. Heracles shows it to Eurystheus and then lets it go. The bull wanders until it reaches Marathon.

The capture has moved the danger to a new place. It has not ended it. The order gave Heracles no lasting place where the living animal could be kept.

The father, not the Minotaur

The Poseidon version joins the bull to another Cretan story, the story of the Minotaur. In that version, the bull is the Minotaur’s father. It is not the Minotaur under another name.

Heracles captures an animal that already belongs to the story of Minos keeping the bull and of Pasiphae’s child. His labour does not take him into the Labyrinth, and it does not put the father in place of the later monster.

The bull has several roles. It may be the bull that carried Europa, or the offering Poseidon sent and Minos refused to give up. In the sacrificial version it is also the father of the Minotaur. The ancient versions link these roles. They do not treat the bull and its child as the same creature.

Minos at Knossos

Knossos gives the story its royal setting, but it does not settle where the bull came from. In the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer, Knossos is the city of Minos, and later tradition kept it as his seat. That places the king who appears in both versions. It does not show which story of the bull is the right one.

In the Poseidon story, the human choice belongs to the king of Knossos. Minos receives an animal meant for sacrifice and keeps it. The results follow one after another: the bull turns savage, Pasiphae desires it, Asterius is born, and in the end Heracles is set his labour. In the other story, Knossos is still the city of Minos, and the bull arrives with Europa’s earlier crossing behind it.

The bull in carving and on coins

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia showed the Cretan Bull among the Labours on its metopes, the square carved panels above the columns. One original panel from the temple, carved in marble from the island of Paros, survives in the Louvre museum as Ma 716. It is dated to about 460 BC. Its upper two thirds remain. The arms of Heracles and the head of the bull are missing, but traces of red paint can still be seen on the animal.

Crete keeps a smaller record. Silver coins from Phaistos, a city on Crete, are now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum as object N1186. Five Labours appear on them, including the Bull of Crete. Olympia, Knossos and the museum in Heraklion keep three different traces: the run of carvings on the temple, the traditional seat of Minos and the bull shown on Cretan silver.