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Creation and appearance

The bronze "Horned God" from Enkomi, Cyprus

After ascending the throne of the island of Crete, Minos competed with his brothers as ruler. Minos prayed to the sea god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of the god's favour. Minos was to sacrifice the bull to honor Poseidon, but owing to the bull's beauty he decided instead to keep him. Minos believed that the god would accept a substitute sacrifice. To punish Minos, Poseidon made Minos' wife Pasiphaë fall in love with the bull. Pasiphaë had the craftsman Daedalus fashion a hollow wooden cow, which she climbed into to mate with the bull. The monstrous Minotaur was the result. Pasiphaë nursed the Minotaur but he grew in size and became ferocious. As the unnatural offspring of a woman and a beast, the Minotaur had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured humans for sustenance. Minos, following advice from the oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic Labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos's palace in Knossos.

Roman copy of a statue of the Minotaur's torso

The Minotaur is commonly represented in Classical art with the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull. According to Sophocles's Trachiniai, when the river spirit Achelous seduced Deianira, one of the guises he assumed was a man with the head of a bull. From classical antiquity through the Renaissance, the Minotaur appears at the center of many depictions of the Labyrinth. Ovid's Latin account of the Minotaur, which did not describe which half was bull and which half-man, was the most widely available during the Middle Ages, and several later versions show a man's head and torso on a bull's body – the reverse of the Classical configuration, reminiscent of a centaur. This alternative tradition survived into the Renaissance, and is reflected in Dryden's elaborated translation of Virgil's description of the Minotaur in Book VI of the Aeneid: "The lower part a beast, a man above / The monument of their polluted love." It still figures in some modern depictions, such as Steele Savage's illustrations for Edith Hamilton's Mythology (1942).

References in media

References in Ancient Greek literature

Apollodorus' Bibliotheca

In the work Bibliotheca (sometimes translated into English as Library), attributed to "Pseudo-Apollodorus", in Chapter 1 of Book 3, the story of the creation of the Minotaur is told. Minos was punished for not sacrificing Poseidon's bull, so his wife fell in love with it and bore Asterius, the Minotaur. Then, heeding the advice of "certain oracles" had a labyrinth constructed and the Minotaur locked away there.

Pausanias' Description of Greece

The Minotaur is briefly mentioned in Chapter 27 of Pausanias' Description of Greece, where it is said that Minos led a fleet against Athens, who he believed to had killed his son. He harassed them until them until they agree to send seven boy and girls to the Minotaur in the labyrinth at Knossos.

Isocrates' Helen

In Section 27 of Isocrates' oration Helena (or Helen), he briefly tells an Athenian perspective of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, calling the Minotaur "the monster reared in Crete". He also claims that it was an oracle that advised the tribute of the children and that Theseus thought he would rather die than to rule a city that paid a tribute of children's lives to their enemy.

Other references

Dante's Inferno

Dante and Virgil meet the Minotaur, illustration by Gustave Doré

The Minotaur (infamia di Creti, Italian for 'infamy of Crete'), appears briefly in Dante's Inferno, in Canto 12 (l. 12–13, 16–21), where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the "men of blood": those damned for their violent natures. Some commentators believe that Dante, in a reversal of classical tradition, bestowed the beast with a man's head upon a bull's body, though this representation had already appeared in the Middle Ages.

Lo savio mio inver' lui gridò: "Forse
tu credi che qui sia 'l duca d'Atene,
che sú nel mondo la morte ti porse?
Pártiti, bestia, ché questi non-vene
ammaestrato da la tua sorella,
ma vassi per veder la vostre pene."

My sage cried out to him: "You think,
perhaps, this is the Duke of Athens,
who in the world put you to death.
Get away, you beast, for this man
does not come tutored by your sister;
he comes to view your punishments."

—Inferno, Canto XII, lines 16–20

William Blake's image of the Minotaur to illustrate Inferno XII

In these lines, Virgil taunts the Minotaur to distract him, and reminds the Minotaur that he was killed by Theseus the Duke of Athens with the help of the monster's half-sister Ariadne. The Minotaur is the first infernal guardian whom Virgil and Dante encounter within the walls of Dis. The Minotaur seems to represent the entire zone of Violence, much as Geryon represents Fraud in Canto XVI, and serves a similar role as gatekeeper for the entire seventh Circle.

Giovanni Boccaccio writes of the Minotaur in his literary commentary of the Commedia: "When he had grown up and become a most ferocious animal, and of incredible strength, they tell that Minos had him shut up in a prison called the labyrinth, and that he had sent to him there all those whom he wanted to die a cruel death". Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his own commentary, compares the Minotaur with all three sins of violence within the seventh circle: "The Minotaur, who is situated at the rim of the tripartite circle, fed, according to the poem was biting himself (violence against oneself) and was conceived in the 'false cow' (violence against nature, daughter of God)."

Virgil and Dante then pass quickly by to the centaurs (Nessus, Chiron and Pholus) who guard the Flegetonte ("river of blood"), to continue through the seventh Circle.

Surrealist art

Edward Burne-Jones's illustration of Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, 1861

• From 1933 to 1939, Albert Skira published an avant-garde literary magazine Minotaure, with covers featuring a Minotaur theme. The first issue had cover art by Pablo Picasso. Later covers included work by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Diego Rivera.
• Pablo Picasso made a series of etchings in the Vollard Suite showing the Minotaur being tormented, possibly inspired also by Spanish bullfighting. He also depicted a Minotaur in his 1933 etching Minotaur Kneeling over Sleeping Girl and in his 1935 etching Minotauromachy.

Television, literature and plays

• Argentine author Julio Cortázar published the play Los reyes (The Kings) in 1949, which reinterprets the Minotaur's story. In the book, Ariadne is not in love with Theseus, but with her brother the Minotaur.
• Mika Waltari's 1945 historical novel The Egyptian, set in the 14th century BC, sees the protagonist and his slave venture into the Cretan labyrinth in search of the protagonist's love interest, sacrificed to a Cretan god beforehand. Minotaur, in turn, is the name of the chief Cretan priest who wears a bull mask, which makes people confuse him for an actual human/bull hybrid upon first encounter in a dim light.
• The short story The House of Asterion by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges gives the Minotaur's story from the monster's perspective.
• Asterion, depicted as a human prince who wears a bull mask, is the chief antagonist of The King Must Die, Mary Renault's 1958 reinterpretation of the Theseus myth in the light of the excavation of Knossos.
• Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves features both the labyrinth and the Minotaur as prominent themes.
• Aleksey Ryabinin's book Theseus (2018). provides a retelling of the myths of Theseus, Minotaur, Ariadne and other personages of Greek mythology.
• The Minotaur, an opera by Harrison Birtwistle.

Board and video games

• In the video game Hades (2020) by Supergiant Games, the protagonist defeats the Minotaur (named Asterius) in Elysium, where he fights beside Theseus.

Film

• Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete, a 1960 Italian film directed by Silvio Amadio and starring Bob Mathias
• A monster resembling the Minotaur (and named as such) appears in the 1981 film Time Bandits.
• Minotaur, a horror adaptation of the legend starring actor Tom Hardy as Theo (Theseus), was released on DVD by Lions Gate in 2006.
• Natalie Portman and Danny McBride team up to fight a minotaur while reclaiming a magical sword from a labyrinth in Your Highness, released in 2008 by Universal Pictures.