Minos was king of Crete, and the first ruler to control the Mediterranean Sea.
He had with him a famed craftsman, Daedalus the Athenian.
Minos had boasted that the gods would grant him any wish; he made
all the preparations for a sacrifice to Poseidon, then prayed that a bull would
emerge from the sea. Miraculously, a beautiful white bull swam ashore.
Minos admired it so much that he decided to keep it, and sacrificed a
different one from his herd instead.
This unwise decision annoyed Poseidon, who avenged the insult by
causing queen Pasiphae to fall madly in love with the white bull. Her request
to Daedalus was that he should help her consummate this passion. He did so
by building an hollow wooden cow, covered with hide and with a door on top
through which she could lower herself inside. Together, they wheeled it into
the pasture where the bull was kept; Daedalus helped her get in, and then
discreetly withdrew. Pasiphae was completely satisfied, but to everyone's
horror, she then bore the Minotaur, a creature with a man's body but a bull's
head.
Minos, annoyed in turn, sent to the oracle at Delphi to discover how he
could hide this evidence of the shame to the royal family. The oracle
answered that he ought to have Daedalus build a suitable cage; Minos
thereupon had Daedalus build the Labyrinth, an enormous maze, and placed
the Minotaur at the center of it. Minos also arranged to sacrifice young men
and women to the flesh-eating Minotaur by shutting them into the Labyrinth,
where they would wander, hopelessly lost, until the Minotaur caught and
devoured them.
One of Minos's ) sons by Pasiphae was Androgeus, who visited
Athens to compete in the All-Athenian games, where he won every contest.
King Aegeus knew that Androgeus was in contact with his internal enemies,
the sons of Pallas, and was afraid that he might persuade his father, Minos, to
intervene on their behalf. Therefore, he laid an ambush for the young man
with the help of the Megareans. After a fierce battle, in which he fought very
bravely, Androgeus was killed.
When Minos heard of the death of his son, he became enraged, and
gathered a great fleet together to avenge the murder. Although he was the
ruler of the Mediterranean, quite a few of the Greeks fought on the side of
Athens, or stayed neutral. With all of his power, though, Minos was unable to
defeat the Greeks until he called on the aid of Zeus to avenge Androgeus.
Greece was hit by famine and earthquakes, and the oracle at Delphi
advised the Athenians to satisfy any demands that Minos made in return for
peace. The demand was for a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be
given every nine years, as sacrifice to the Minotaur, to which the Athenians
reluctantly agreed.
Anyway, 9 years came around and it was time for 14 people to be
sacrificed. Theseus volunteered to lead the group himself, promising the
families of the others who would go with him that he would bring them all
back alive. Aegeus, Theseus's father, was not eager to allow his son to go on
so dangerous a task, but Theseus insisted, promising to hoist a white sail
upon his return, rather than the usual black one, to signal his father that he
was returning safely.
The ship left for Crete with Theseus and thirteen other Athenians
aboard - two of the "maidens" were actually young men who were dressed
up.
When they arrived in port, Minos himself came down to see them.
Minos's daughter, Ariadne, who had accompanied her father to see the arrival
of the ship, fell instantly in love with him. She was determined to help him,
and asked for the help of Daedalus, who came up with the idea of using a
ball of string to trace the way into, and back out of, the Minotaur's lair.
Armed with a sword that Ariadne gave him, Theseus entered the
Labyrinth, worked his way to the very center, found and killed the Minotaur,
and found his way back to the entrance of the Labyrinth with the aid of the
string. When he came out, dripping with blood, Ariadne embraced him. The
others had managed to escape from their prison with the help of the youths
disguised as women who had killed the guards in the women's quarters. They
made their way to the harbor and stole the ship in which they had been
brought to Crete, but an alarm went off, and they had to fight their way out.
On the way home, Theseus forgot to change his sail from black to
white. As the ship pulled in to port, Aegeus, seeing the black sail, assumed
that Theseus had died, and lept from a cliff to his death in the sea that still
bears his name.
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