Pasiphae and the Minotaur

Minos had married Pasiphae, a daughter of the sun god Helios, and made her his queen. Together they had four sons—Catreus, Deucalion, Glaucus, and Androgeos—and five daughters—Ariadne, Phaedra, Acacallis, Xenodice, and Euryale. Minos also had many illegitimate children. After years of enduring her husband’s infidelities, Pasiphae concocted a potion that made Minos imagine that snakes and scorpions were coming out of his body whenever he made love to another woman.

Poseidon finally took his revenge on Minos by causing Pasiphae to fall helplessly in love with the bull from the sea. However, the animal did not reciprocate her affections. While Minos was abroad expanding his empire, Pasiphae summoned Daedalus, the court inventor, to devise a contraption that would enable her to make love with the bull. He built a hollow statue of a cow inside which Pasiphae could lie. When the bull saw the effigy in his pasture, he mistook it for a real cow and mounted it, thus impregnating the queen of Crete. The product of this union was a baby boy with a bull’s head. Our primary source for the story of Pasiphae and the bull is The Cretans, a play credited to Greek dramatist Euripides (c. 486—c. 406 BCE). Now lost, the work is reputed to have had Pasiphae arguing that it must have been the gods who made her fall in love with the bull in order to punish Minos, and denying that it was as a result of anything she had done.

When Minos returned from his travels, he was so disgusted at the sight of the bull-headed infant that he commissioned Daedalus to create a home for it hidden deep beneath the royal palace. Daedalus built a massive, complex maze from which the monster was unable to escape because it could never find the exit. Named the Minotaur, the bull-headed creature lived on human flesh.

Events outside of Crete provided a gruesome supply of food for the beast. Minos’s son Androgeos was a great athlete. He won the Panathenaic Games, which were held in Athens in honor of the goddess Athena, but was murdered shortly after his victory. In vengeance, Minos laid siege to Athens. Although he had a mighty army, he was unable to conquer the city. Minos prayed to his father for help. In response, Zeus sent a plague and famine to Athens.

The Athenians, desperate to find ways of ending their suffering, sought the advice of an oracle who told them that they should submit to whatever terms Minos demanded. In return for ending the siege, Minos required that a tribute of seven youths and seven girls be sent to Crete (either annually or every nine years) as food for the Minotaur. The tribute ended only when the Athenian hero Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped from the Labyrinth with the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne.