What Is the Minotaur? The Labyrinth, Theseus and the Bull of Crete

Minos, king of Crete, asked Poseidon for a sign that his claim to the throne was favoured by the gods, and the god sent a white bull out of the sea, on the understanding that Minos would sacrifice it back to him. The bull was so beautiful that Minos kept it and killed another in its place. Poseidon's revenge was to make Minos's wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the animal. She went to Daedalus, the Athenian craftsman in exile at the Cretan court, who built her a hollow wooden cow covered in hide in which she could be mounted by the bull, and the child of that union was the Minotaur, whose name means simply the bull of Minos. Minos could not kill him and could not show him, so he had Daedalus build the Labyrinth, a building of such winding passages that nothing put inside could find the way out, and shut the creature in.

Minos's son Androgeus had gone to Athens for the games, won every event, and been killed, either by jealous rivals or by a bull he was sent to fight. Minos made war on Athens and won, and the terms of the peace were the tribute: seven youths and seven maidens, chosen by lot, to be sent to Crete every nine years, or every year in some tellings, and given to the Minotaur. It had happened twice when Theseus, the son of the Athenian king Aegeus and newly arrived in the city, volunteered to go as one of the seven and kill the beast. He sailed under a black sail, and promised his father to change it to a white one on the way home if he lived.

At Knossos, Minos's daughter Ariadne saw Theseus and fell in love with him, and she went, as her mother had, to Daedalus, who told her the secret of his own building: that the way out was the way in. She gave Theseus a ball of thread to tie at the entrance and unwind as he went, and a sword, and in the heart of the maze he found the Minotaur and killed it, in most versions with his bare hands, and followed the thread back. That night he sailed with Ariadne and the thirteen others, having holed the Cretan ships so they could not follow. The elements of the story that every version keeps:

• •A king who cheated a god and was punished through his family
• •A monster who was the king's own stepson, hidden rather than destroyed
• •A building designed by a master craftsman to be impossible to leave
• •A hero who went in voluntarily and a princess whose simple device beat the master's design
• •A homecoming that went wrong

Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos on the way home, for reasons the tellers never agree on: forgetfulness, a command from the gods, another woman, or the arrival of the god Dionysus, who found her weeping on the shore and married her, setting her crown among the stars. Theseus then forgot the sail, and Aegeus, watching from the cliffs for the ship and seeing it black, threw himself into the sea that has been called the Aegean since. Daedalus, imprisoned by Minos for his part in it, built wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus and flew out of Crete, and the son, flying too near the sun, fell. Minos pursued the craftsman to Sicily and was killed there in a bath.

In 1900 Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos, a few kilometres from Heraklion, and found a Bronze Age palace of some thirteen hundred rooms on several levels connected by corridors, stairways and light wells, decorated with frescoes of bulls and of young men and women somersaulting over their horns, and with the double axe, the labrys, carved everywhere in its stone. Evans named the civilisation Minoan, after the king, and proposed that the palace was the Labyrinth: a building so large and confusing that mainland Greeks, who arrived as its conquerors around 1450 BC, remembered it as a maze, and the bull sports of its courtyard as a monster that ate the young. The identification is not certain and the word labyrinth may not come from labrys at all, but a real palace, a real cult of the bull and a real overlordship of Crete over the Aegean lie behind the story, and Athens did send tribute to somebody.

The Minotaur has been retold as a figure of pity as often as of horror. In Ovid he is a disgrace to be hidden; in Dante he guards the circle of the violent; in Borges's story The House of Asterion he is the narrator, alone in his house of endless doors, waiting without fear for the redeemer who will come, and Picasso, in the 1930s, drew himself as the beast, blind and led by a girl.

The labyrinth of the story is a maze full of dead ends, which is why Theseus needed a thread. But the labyrinth shown in ancient art is something else. Silver coins struck at Knossos in the Classical and Hellenistic periods carry a design of a single winding path that folds back and forth to reach the centre with no choices along the way, a type now called the classical or Cretan labyrinth. Someone walking it cannot get lost, only take a long time. The same pattern was drawn on the back of a Bronze Age clay tablet from Pylos.

The single path had a long later life. Roman floor mosaics often show the labyrinth with Theseus and the Minotaur fighting at its centre, and medieval builders laid versions into cathedral floors, the best known being the one in the nave of Chartres Cathedral, which worshippers walked as a small pilgrimage. A Linear B tablet from Knossos may even record an offering of honey to a mistress of the labyrinth, if the reading of the word is right. The walkers' labyrinth and the storytellers' maze have been confused with each other ever since.

The ship that brought Theseus home had a long afterlife. According to Plutarch, the Athenians preserved the vessel, a thirty-oared galley, for centuries, replacing each timber as it rotted until hardly any of the original wood remained. Philosophers seized on it as a puzzle about identity: if every plank has been replaced, is it still the same ship? Thomas Hobbes later sharpened the question by asking what would happen if someone rebuilt a second ship from the discarded planks. The puzzle, still called the ship of Theseus, is applied today to everything from restored buildings to the cells of the human body.

The same voyage delayed a real death. Athenian tradition held that the city had vowed to Apollo, if the young people sent to Crete came home safe, to send a sacred mission to his island of Delos every year, and that it used Theseus's ship to do so. While the mission was away, Athens had to remain ritually pure, and no one could be executed. In 399 BC the ship had been garlanded for departure the day before Socrates was tried, so the philosopher spent about a month in prison waiting for it to return, the setting of Plato's dialogues Crito and Phaedo.

Visitors to Knossos today walk through a palace that is partly a modern building. Arthur Evans, wanting to protect the excavated remains and to help people imagine the original, rebuilt sections in the 1920s and 1930s using reinforced concrete, restoring upper storeys, staircases and the distinctive red columns that taper towards the base. Much of what appears in photographs of the site is therefore a twentieth-century interpretation laid over Bronze Age stone. Archaeologists generally regard the reconstructions as a mixed legacy: they saved some fragile structures and made the site vivid, but they also fixed one man's vision of the palace into the ruins themselves.

The famous frescoes need the same care. Many were rebuilt by the artist Emile Gillieron and his son from small surviving fragments, with large missing areas supplied by informed guesswork, and some well-known images, such as the figure called the Prince of the Lilies, may combine pieces from more than one original figure. Even the room names, such as the Throne Room and the Queen's Megaron, are Evans's interpretations, not labels found on the site. The Minoans' own script, Linear A, has still not been deciphered, so their words about their palace cannot yet be read. What Knossos tells us about the Minotaur passes through layers of later imagination.

The Minotaur was the bull-headed son of Pasiphae, queen of Crete, and a bull sent by Poseidon, hidden by King Minos in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built and fed on youths sent from Athens as tribute, until Theseus killed him and escaped by the thread Ariadne gave him. Behind the myth stands the Bronze Age palace of Knossos, with its maze of rooms and its cult of the bull, remembered by the Greeks who overthrew it.