The Bull from the Sea: Minos’s Broken Vow and the Minotaur

In the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Antonio Canova’s marble Theseus sits on the body of the Minotaur, calm and almost pensive, the fight already over. It is one of the great images of the myth, and like most of them it begins at the end. The creature under the hero’s weight had a mother, a stepfather and a reason for existing, and the ancient sources that tell his story start not in the Labyrinth but at the seashore, with a king asking a god for a sign.

A bull as proof of kingship

Apollodorus, the most orderly of our mythographers, sets out the sequence. When Asterius, king of Crete and husband of Europa, died without children of his own, Minos wanted the throne and met opposition. He claimed that the gods had granted him the kingdom, and as proof he declared that whatever he prayed for would happen. Sacrificing to Poseidon, he asked for a bull to rise from the deep and promised to sacrifice it in return. A bull of extraordinary beauty walked out of the sea. Minos got his kingdom, and then he sent the bull to join his herds and sacrificed another in its place.

Diodorus gives a slightly different picture. In his account it was Minos’s custom to offer the finest bull of each year to Poseidon; when an unusually handsome one was born, he kept it and sacrificed a lesser animal. Either way, the outline is the same. The bull was a token of divine favour, and the king could not bear to give it back.

Poseidon’s anger did not fall on Minos directly. The god made the bull savage, and he made Pasiphae, the queen, desire it.

Pasiphae’s sentence

Pasiphae was no ordinary consort. She was a daughter of Helios, the Sun, and a sister of the sorceress Circe; she belonged to the old powers of the world. Yet in the myth she becomes the instrument of a punishment aimed at her husband, and the ancient tellers did not agree on how to judge her.

Some made her a byword. In Ovid, the abandoned princess Scylla taunts Minos with a wife who preferred a bull to him. Others listened to her side. Euripides wrote a tragedy, the Cretans, now lost except for fragments, and one papyrus preserves part of Pasiphae’s defence before Minos. With bitter irony she asks what a woman could possibly have found to love in a bull, and then she turns the charge around: the madness came from a god, and the god was angry because Minos had broken his vow. The fault, she insists, is his. The surviving lines go on to show Minos ordering her to be taken away and locked up; how the play ended is unknown.

It is a rare moment in Greek tragedy: a woman accused of the most shameful desire imaginable who refuses to accept the shame. The god did not strike the man who broke the vow. He struck the woman beside him, and she says so.

Daedalus’s two machines

Then the craftsman enters. Daedalus, an Athenian exiled for murder, was living at Minos’s court, and Pasiphae turned to him. Apollodorus describes what he built: a wooden cow on wheels, hollow inside, covered with the hide of a real cow and set in the meadow where the bull grazed. Pasiphae climbed in, and the bull came to her. A wall painting in the House of the Vettii at Pompeii shows the moment before, with Daedalus presenting his finished cow to the queen like a sculptor unveiling a commission.

The child was called Asterius, a name he shares with the old Cretan king, but he was known as the Minotaur, “Minos’s bull”: a man’s body with a bull’s face. An Etruscan cup in Paris shows Pasiphae with the infant on her lap, and the scene is unexpectedly tender. Minos, guided by oracles, had Daedalus build a second marvel, the Labyrinth, whose tangled passages confused anyone who tried to find the way out, and shut the creature inside.

Ovid states plainly what the building was for.

The disgrace of the house had grown, and the mother’s foul adultery lay open in the strangeness of the two-formed monster. Minos resolved to remove this shame from his chamber and shut it in a house of many rooms and blind passages.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Note the word shame. The Labyrinth is less a cage built against a danger than a cover built over a scandal, and the scandal began with the king. One machine produced the problem and another hid it, and Daedalus made both: a craftsman as essential to this story as Hephaestus is to the making of Pandora.

The guilty judge

What followed is the part everyone knows. When Minos’s son Androgeos died in Attica, Minos made war on Athens, and an oracle told the Athenians to give him whatever satisfaction he asked. He demanded seven young men and seven young women as food for the Minotaur, sent every nine years in the versions of Ovid and Plutarch. Theseus went with the third group, Ariadne gave him a thread, and the creature died in the dark.

Even in antiquity, not everyone believed it. Plutarch reports a Cretan version, preserved by the Athenian historian Philochorus, in which the Labyrinth was simply a prison and “the bull” a harsh general named Taurus, who won the Athenian youths as prizes. Pausanias, walking the Acropolis, saw a sculpture of Theseus fighting “the so-called bull of Minos” and remarked that no one could be sure whether it had been a man or a beast.

On one point, though, the sources agree: Minos never paid in person. The bull runs through his family like a vein through marble. He was himself the son of Europa, whom Zeus carried to Crete in the shape of a bull, a scene Arachne would weave into her tapestry of the gods’ deceptions. The bull from the sea, once released, became one of Heracles’s Labours and ended its days at Marathon. And Minos, after death, became a judge. In the Odyssey, Odysseus sees him in the Underworld holding a golden sceptre and giving judgments to the dead, not far from where Sisyphus pushes his stone. The man who broke his word to a god sits in judgment on others for eternity, while the creature he hid away is remembered as the monster of the story.