In a possibly apocryphal dialogue called Minos, Plato has Socrates explain how Minos came to have the terrible reputation he garnered at Athens. He blames the Athenian authors of tragedy:
Socrates
Do you not know which of the Greeks use the most ancient laws?
Companion
Do you mean the Spartans, and Lycurgus the lawgiver?
Socrates
But whence is it that [318d] the best of those ordinances come? Do you know?
Companion
From Crete, so they say.
Socrates
Then the people there use the most ancient laws in Greece?
Companion
Yes.
Socrates
Then do you know who were their good kings? Minos and Rhadamanthus, the sons of Zeus and Europa; those laws were theirs.
Companion
Rhadamanthus, they do say, Socrates, was a just man; but Minos was a savage sort of person, harsh and unjust.
Socrates
Your tale, my excellent friend, is a fiction of Attic tragedy.
Companion
. . . how has it ever come about, Socrates, that this report is spread abroad of Minos, as an uneducated [320e] and harsh-tempered person?
Socrates
Because of something that will make both you, if you are wise, my excellent friend, and everybody else who cares to have a good reputation, beware of ever quarreling with any man of a poetic turn. For poets have great influence over opinion, according as they create it in the minds of men by either commending or vilifying. And this was the mistake that Minos made, in waging war on this city of ours . . .
The tale of Euripides' Hippolytus culminates in the young man's encounter with a bull from the sea. The bull of Crete is woven into several stories, linking Minos, Theseus, and Hippolytus, and is full of variants. Here's one:
When his stepfather Asterios died, Minos wanted to become king of Crete, but the people demanded a sign from the gods. Minos prayed to Poseidon to send a "bull from the depths" of the sea, and promised that he would sacrifice the bull to Poseidon if it should appear. Poseidon granted Minos' request and sent a great bull from the waves to the shore, but Minos kept the bull in his herds and sacrificed another one instead.
Angered by Minos' failure to sacrifice the bull he had sent, Poseidon punished Minos in two ways: he made the bull mad and wild, so that no one could approach him, and he also made Minos' wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. Fortunately for Pasiphae the famous architect Daidalos was living then in Crete . . .. Daidalos' most remarkable accomplishment was what he now made for Pasiphae: a wooden framework on wheels, with a cows's skin stretched over it, constructed in such a way that Pasiphae could get inside it, pedal it to the field where the mad bull was raving, and position herself in such a way that when the bull mounted the artificial cow it would also have sex with Pasiphae inside.
Pasiphae then became pregnant by the mad bull and gave birth to the Minotaur (or Asterios), who had a human body and a bull's head. Minos, who of course wanted to conceal the product of his wife's adulterous bestiality, consulted oracles and was told to have Daidalos build an enormous maze, the Labyrinth, and to put the Minotaur in its center (from which no one could find the way out).
Meanwhile the Minotaur's father, the bull that had been sent by Poseidon, was captured by Herakles for his seventh labor and taken to Eurystheus. After its release the bull wandered around Greece and eventually came to Marathon near Athens. At this time king Aigeus of Athens was holding athletic games during the Panathenean festival, and Minos's son Androgeos came to compete and won all the events. Aigeus then sent Androgeos to fight the bull at Marathon, but the bull killed him.
When Minos heard of the death of his son, he . . . sailed to Athens to gain revenge for his son's death. First he conquered Megara, whose king Nisos had a magic purple hair on his head which made him immortal; Nisos' daughter Skylla fell in love with Minos and pulled the hair out of her father's head, and then Minos killed Nisos and repaid Skylla by drowning her.
Minos now invaded Athens . . . The Athenians then learned from an oracle that their only hope was to pay whatever tribute Minos would demand, and Minos ordered Athens to send to Crete every year (or every nine years) seven young men and seven maidens to be eaten by the Minotaur.
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| Minotaur |
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