What was the Minotaur?

The Minotaur

The Minotaur is the son Pasiphae bears to a bull. Apollodorus names him Asterius and gives him a bull’s face and a man’s body. Minos shuts him in the Labyrinth at Knossos, and Athens sends seven young men and seven young women as tribute. Theseus kills him with his fists and escapes with Ariadne’s thread. Plutarch records a Cretan version with no monster, in which a general named Taurus won the young Athenians as prizes.

In short

Apollodorus names the Minotaur Asterius and gives him the face of a bull, the rest of him human. Minos shuts him in the Labyrinth in obedience to certain oracles.
Plutarch says most writers agree that Athens sent seven young men and as many young women every nine years, after Minos attacked Attica over the killing of his son Androgeos.
Euripides, quoted by Plutarch, calls the Minotaur “a mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape” in whom “two different natures, man and bull, were joined”.
In Apollodorus, Theseus kills him with his fists in the last part of the Labyrinth. He finds the way out by following the thread Ariadne gave him.
Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch, says the Cretans denied the story. In their account the Labyrinth was a prison, the Athenians were prizes at the funeral games for Androgeos, and the winner was the cruel general Taurus.
Knossos put the running Minotaur on its silver coins, with the maze on the other side. The American Numismatic Society dates one such coin to between 425 and 360 BC.

The bull and Pasiphae

The story begins with a bull that Minos of Crete keeps back from sacrifice instead of offering it to the god Poseidon. Poseidon makes the bull wild and dangerous. He also makes Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with it. The craftsman Daedalus builds her a hollow wooden cow covered in hide. Pasiphae then gives birth to a son called Asterius, known as the Minotaur.

Apollodorus, whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths, gives him the face of a bull and the body of a man. Minos shuts him in the Labyrinth at Knossos, a maze on Crete. He does this to obey certain oracles, messages from the gods.

The playwright Euripides calls the Minotaur a mixed birth, in whom the natures of a man and a bull meet. The words survive only because the Greek writer Plutarch quotes them. Neither source shows the Minotaur choosing his prison or the hunger that later retellings give him. The choices belong to Poseidon, Pasiphae, Daedalus and Minos. The child of mixed birth only receives the locked room.

Why Athens sends its children

Plutarch says most writers tie the tribute to the death of Androgeos, a son of Minos, in Attica, the land around Athens. Minos makes war on Athens. At the same time, the land fails to bear crops, disease spreads and the rivers run dry. An oracle tells the Athenians to give Minos what he asks. They agree to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete every nine years.

Apollodorus places Theseus, a young man of Athens, in the third group. Ariadne, a daughter of Minos, asks Daedalus how to get out of the maze. She then gives Theseus a ball of thread.

In this chain of events, the Minotaur becomes a tool in a quarrel that began somewhere else. Androgeos dies, Minos punishes Athens, and Athenian families hand over their children to the prison on Crete.

The fight at the end of the thread

Theseus reaches the last part of the Labyrinth and finds the Minotaur there. Apollodorus gives him no sword for the meeting. Theseus kills the creature with his fists. Then he gathers up Ariadne’s thread and follows it back to the entrance.

Strength can overcome the creature inside the maze. Only someone else’s knowledge gets Theseus out of the building.

The victory answers the Athenian tribute with a single death. Yet the sources disagree about who the prisoner at Knossos really was. He may be a creature with a bull’s face. He may be a cruel general called Taurus. Or the Minotaur may be only the name that later storytellers gave to forced servitude.

The story without a monster

The writer Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch, says the Cretans denied the familiar story. In their account, the Labyrinth was a well-guarded prison and not a magical maze. Minos gave the captive Athenians as prizes at funeral games held for Androgeos. His general Taurus won them again and again. Taurus was harsh and arrogant, but he was a man.

Plutarch also cites a work by Aristotle, the Constitution of Bottiaea, for another explanation. In this version the young Athenians were not killed. They lived as slaves on Crete, and their descendants later travelled through Delphi and Italy to Thrace.

Both accounts remove the half-bull body but keep the force used on the captives. The Minotaur disappears, but the prisoners do not go free.

The creature on the coins of Knossos

Whatever the Cretans told Philochorus, the city of Knossos used the Minotaur as its emblem. A silver coin known as a stater shows the Minotaur running on one side and a square maze on the other. The American Numismatic Society, which holds the coin, dates it to between 425 and 360 BC.

The coin does not prove that a palace at Knossos held a maze, or that a creature of mixed birth lived there. It shows that Knossos in that period chose both figures as signs of the city that people would recognise. The coin keeps both ancient possibilities together: a creature drawn in motion, and an enclosure reduced to lines with no clear way out.

The picture does not explain the story away, as the Cretan denial does. Knossos could put the Minotaur on its coins while Cretans offered a human Taurus to explain the Athenian tale. The city’s silver leaves that contradiction in plain view.

Places to visit

Knossos

Crete

Every telling that names a place puts the Minotaur at Knossos. In Apollodorus, Minos shuts him in the Labyrinth there, and Theseus kills him in its last part. Plutarch reports a Cretan version with no monster at all, only a general of Minos named Taurus, who won the young Athenians as prizes at funeral games.
Knossos