The Minotaur

The Minotaur exists because Minos, king of Crete, tried to cheat a god. Praying for a sign that the throne was his by right, he asked Poseidon for a bull from the sea and promised to sacrifice it back. The bull came — white, faultless, the finest animal anyone had seen. Minos kept it and sacrificed a lesser one instead.

Poseidon's revenge went through the king's household rather than the king. He made Minos's wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull, and the child she bore had a man's body and a bull's head. His name was Asterion, 'starry one'; history remembers him only as the Minotaur, the bull of Minos, named for the man too ashamed to claim him.

Minos had the craftsman Daedalus build a maze beneath the palace at Knossos so intricate that its own architect could barely escape it, and shut the creature inside. Athens, defeated in war, was made to send seven young men and seven young women into the Labyrinth at intervals to be devoured. On the third tribute Theseus volunteered. Minos's daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread to unwind behind him, and he killed the Minotaur in the dark and walked back out along his own trail.

The oldest tellings are notably unsentimental about who the monster was. He did not choose his shape, he did not build the maze, and he never left it. The Roman poet Ovid gives him a single devastating line of framing — part man, part bull — and leaves the reader to sit with the arithmetic.