The Minotaur According to the historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century BC, it was the Cretan king Minos who built the first navy and dominated the known world (to the ancient Greeks, this meant the Aegean). Minos was the son of the god Zeus and Europa, the mortal daughter of the king of Phoenicia. Zeus was dazzled by her beauty and, for reasons best known only to himself, decided to appear before her in the guise of a snow-white bull. Unlikely as it may seem, the plan worked. Europa was tantalized by his enormous dewlaps and his gentle demeanour and began to play with him, decorating his horns with garlands of flowers. She even took to climbing on his back and riding him, but one day he suddenly plunged into the sea and swam away with her. He swam all of the way to Crete and, upon coming ashore, changed himself into an eagle and raped her. The myth is generally believed to have developed around the seizure of the island by Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland in the 15th century BC and the triumph of the patriarchal sky god over the local mother goddess. Europa gave birth to three sons by Zeus—Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon—and, when he abandoned her, she married Asterion, the king of the island. Their marriage was childless, however, and he adopted the boys as his own. After his death, he was succeeded by Minos who, with the help of Poseidon, gained control of the island.

However, the king tried to cheat the god of his reward, the sacrifice of a snowy white bull, and substituted a lesser animal from his own herd. As a punishment, Poseidon caused Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, to fall passionately in love with the bull and she begged Daedalus, the legendary craftsman, to help her satisfy her lust. So Daedalus built a wooden cow, hollow and upholstered with leather inside so that the queen might lie within. The result of their unnatural union was the Minotaur, half man and half bull, whom Minos ordered hidden, along with his mother, at the centre of a maze underneath his palace at Knossos. The palace was known as the Labyrinth, a term that was apparently related to the pre-Greek word labrys and probably meant “House of the Double Axe.”

Minos and Pasiphaë had several other children, including Androgeos, Ariadne, and Phaedra. When Androgeos was killed by the Athenians, Minos went to war to avenge his death. He defeated the Athenians and extracted a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens who were sent to Knossos every nine years to be fed to the Minotaur. On the third occasion of the sacrifice, Theseus, the son of the Athenian king, offered to go in the place of one of the victims. When he arrived in Crete, the princess Ariadne instantly fell in love with him and offered to help him slay the monster. She gave him a sword and a ball of thread, which he unrolled as he made his way to the heart of the Labyrinth and killed the beast. He then retraced his steps, freed his comrades and they all sailed back to Athens, including Ariadne whom Theseus had promised to marry. However, when they reached the island of Naxos he left her sleeping under a tree and returned home without her. According to some versions of the story, she hanged herself in despair but in at least one account she was rescued by the god Dionysus who married her.

For over three thousand years, these stories were virtually all that remained of the history of Bronze Age Crete and were dismissed as mere legends by scholarly opinion. But this all changed in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the publication of Heinrich Schliemann’s account of his excavations at Troy and Mycenae. These suggested that Aegean World had a long prehistoric past and that there might be some truth in them after all.