Europa

Whose daughter Europa was

Europa is a princess from Phoenicia. The ancient sources do not give her one father.

Apollodorus, a later writer who retold the Greek myths, begins with Agenor, king of Phoenicia, and his daughter Europa. Then he records another account, in which her father is Phoenix. Homer, the poet of the Iliad, follows this second family line. In the Iliad, Zeus remembers the daughter of Phoenix who bore him Minos and Rhadamanthys. The poet Moschus also calls her the daughter of Phoenix.

The question matters because the search for her starts from the family she loses. In Apollodorus, Agenor sends her brothers Cadmus, Phoenix and Cilix to find her. He orders them not to come back without her. They fail and settle elsewhere. Losing Europa from one household leads to the founding of several new places. Europa herself is carried to an island she did not choose.

The bull that leaves the shore

The fullest telling of her journey is the poem by Moschus. In it, Europa climbs onto a bull because it seems gentle. The animal lets her stroke its neck and kiss its mouth, then kneels at her feet. She calls to her companions to climb on as well. Before they can move, the bull runs for the sea with Europa on its back.

The shore falls away behind them. Europa reaches back towards the women she has left. The bull crosses the waves like a dolphin and carries her out of sight of land. Only then does she ask what kind of creature can treat the sea and the land as the same road.

Zeus answers from beneath the horns. The disguise has won the trust that his own form could not.

The promise during the crossing

Far from land, Europa asks the bull where he is taking her. She calls on the god Poseidon for help. Zeus reveals himself and tells her not to fear the water. Crete, he says, once nursed him, and now it will receive their union. Their sons will be kings.

Apollodorus names three sons: Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthys. Homer names Minos and Rhadamanthys, but elsewhere he gives Sarpedon a different mother, Laodamia. The two family trees cannot both describe the same family. What they share is that Europa’s story moves to Crete through sons who rule or judge there.

The sons on Crete

Minos becomes the strongest of those claims. His throne is at Knossos. His laws and his wars hold together the group of Cretan myths. His own failure over a second bull leads to the birth of the Minotaur.

So the crossing of Europa stands behind a whole further generation of stories. But it should not disappear into them. The voyage begins with her mistaken trust in a gentle animal. It goes on after she calls out from the water and Zeus answers her.

The plane tree and the coins of Gortyn

Gortyn, a city on Crete, claimed the place where the crossing ended. The writer Pliny the Elder describes a plane tree there, beside a spring, that never lost its leaves. Greek and Latin accounts, he says, linked the tree to the union of Zeus and Europa. Cuttings planted elsewhere in Crete grew in the same unusual way.

Gortyn also put Europa on its money for centuries. The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds a stater, a silver coin, from about 450 BC that shows Europa seated on the bull. Another coin, dated 320 to 300 BC, shows her among the branches of a tree, with Zeus as a bull on the other side. The later coin carries the name of the people of Gortyn.

Neither coin shows that the woman carried across the sea was a real person. They show what the city chose to remember. One coin holds the crossing. The other gives Europa the tree that Gortyn claimed as the place where the bull’s disguise ended.