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Nearly every culture around the world has a story to tell, stories that are deeply intertwined with their history, religion, and worldview. While the characters vary, many myths share the same themes.
There’s almost always a deity of the sun or agriculture, likely due to how central these things are to Bronze Age societies. You also have tales of a divine being having children by mortals, usually women, and siring divine, superhuman, and, sometimes, monstrous creatures in the process.
Few cultures have as many myths about half-human and half-divine children than ancient Greece. You could probably already name a few off the top of your head: Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, and the very recent addition, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson.
But there’s one demigod that has largely been forgotten by fans of Greek mythology: King Minos. King Minos was said to be a former ruler of Crete, one of the biggest islands of modern-day Greece.
Though he once held a powerful position that allowed him to kill with just a word, he’s only ever known these days in connection with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur which is pretty understandable because it’s not like some crusty old king is anywhere near as interesting as a valiant hero slaying a monster.
However, there might be more to King Minos than just myth and magic. Recent evidence has shown that the Minos may have actually existed in ancient Crete, just not in the way we would expect.
Who Was King Minos of Crete?
Unlike other demigods of Greek myth, King Minos doesn’t have a laundry list of heroic deeds under his belt. In fact, the first time we hear anything substantial about him is when he’s already an old king with another demigod for a wife and a flesh-eating bull for a son. That said, we at least know who his parents were.
King Minos was said to be the son of the Greek god Zeus and a mortal woman named Europa. Now, Zeus is famous for being the town bicycle of Greek mythology so it was no surprise that when he saw Europa, he decided he was going to have a quick horizontal chacha session with her.
Zeus, as you might already know, is the head god of Olympus. All the other gods answer to him and he shoots lightning bolts at them when they don’t. What you probably don’t know is that Europa may not have been a mortal herself.
King Minos’ story is so old that there are multiple versions of the myths surrounding him. In his mother’s case, some accounts say that she was the daughter of King Agenor of Sidon. But others suggest she was a Cretan moon goddess who was later absorbed into Greek myth.
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Either way, Zeus comes to her in the form of a great white bull which she mates with. Together, they have two sons, Rhadamanthus and King Minos. At some point, Europa moved to Crete and married the Cretan king who later passed his crown onto King Minos.
Later on, King Minos married Pasiphae, the daughter of the sun god Helios who was known for keeping a herd of magical cows. it seems as if no matter where you look in Minos’ story, there’s a variant of magical cattle.
Maybe at this point King Minos was so used to being surrounded by cows that he didn’t bat an eyelash at the idea of magical bulls. There’s so many of them to go around, he must have thought, so it’s not like anyone would notice if I take a magical bull for myself.
He was, of course, very wrong.
What Does King Minos Have to Do With the Minotaur?
Look, there’s no way it’s a stretch of the imagination to say that the ancient Greeks knew what their gods were like. Even in the Iliad and Odyssey, you have ancient heroes talking about the deeds of even ancient-er heroes — which is why you have to stop and ask yourself what divine stupidity or vanity inspired King Minos to steal a bull from Poseidon, god of the seas.
Okay, it wasn’t exactly stolen. The Cretan Bull (not to be confused with the Minotaur, that comes later) was given by Poseidon to King Minos for the express purpose of it being killed as a sacrifice to Poseidon. Basically, he gave it to Minos so Minos could give it back.
This was all fine and dandy since it gave Minos a chance to earn Poseidon’s favor. But when he looked at the white bull with its gleaming horns and bulging muscles, he decided that it was too beautiful to be sacrificed. Make no mistake, this wasn’t some grand act of PETA worthy mercy towards all of bull-kind because King Minos had the bull replaced with an inferior one.
Poseidon was pissed.
No one robs gods of their sacrifice, especially when that god had already specifically said they wanted this exact sacrifice and handed it to you for the sacrificing part. Heck, you don’t even have to be a god to be mad about that. Imagine giving someone the gift you wanted for your birthday and telling them to wrap it only to find that they replaced it with a picture frame. You’d be ticked, too.
But while regular mortals like us would, at most, curse out King Minos for pulling such a stunt, Poseidon was not as forgiving. He went to Aphrodite, goddess of love, and told her to curse Pasiphae with sudden and inexplicable attraction to beautiful white bulls. Thus, the first furry was born.
In true furry fashion, Pasiphae then pulled Daedalus, the same one from the Icarus story, aside and asked him to make her a fursuit. Kidding, it wasn’t a fursuit. It was a wooden cow. When the cow was done, Pasiphae climbed into it and hid, waiting for the white bull to, ahem, mount her.
Yeah. It’s not a great mental image.
King Minos inevitably finds out because his wife gives birth to a half-man, half-bull beast that he then calls the Minotaur. This isn’t canon to the story, but in Circe, Madeline Miller writes that King Minos has named the bull after him to hide the fact that he’s been cuckolded and so he can claim that he has enough divine blood in him to be siring monsters. Weird flex, but okay.
Anyway, the Minotaur is still King Minos’ great shame so he orders Daedalus to construct the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth apparently isn’t a dark underground cell for the Minotaur. What Daedalus had built was a massive palace with numerous rooms and confusing hallways that baffled anyone who wasn’t familiar with its layout or didn’t have the intelligence to ever learn their way around. Like, say, a certain monstrous bull creature.
Aside from shelter, though, monsters also needed to eat. When King Minos’ son died during a sporting event in Athens, he ordered the Athenians to send seven young men and young women to Crete every year. You can imagine what became of them.
Perhaps out of a sense of duty, Theseus, a son of Poseidon, asked his step-dad, King Aegeus of Athens, to send him to Crete as one of the sacrifices. The rest is history. He slays the Minotaur, Ariadne ends up marrying Dionysus, Daedalus escapes with his son Icarus (kinda).
Despite all of the post-Minotaur era stories we have, there’s little follow-up on what happened to King Minos. He disappeared from the limelight of Greek myth just as quickly as he appeared.
That said, some sources tell us that King Minos and the fantastical tales attached to him have some basis in reality.
Were King Minos, the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur Real?
Let’s start with the king himself. There are strange inconsistencies as to who his mother was and what happened during his time. If you’re familiar with the Twelve Labors of Hercules, you might recall that one of the labors involved Hercules being tasked with apprehending the Cretan Bull, supposedly the same bull that Poseidon gave to Minos.
In that version of the story, the bull just goes mad and rampages through the streets of Knossos. There’s no mention of Pasiphae or their son, the Minotaur. Even King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, changes depending on who tells the story.
Other accounts have her as his daughter and his brother’s wife (gross, I know) while in others, she’s his granddaughter. It’s not clear which Ariadne helps Theseus survive the Labyrinth and marries Dionysus either.
These inconsistent accounts might have something to do with the possibility that there wasn’t a King Minos but several King Minoses.
A tablet from the palace of Zakros, which now resides in the Archaeological Museum of Sitia, is said to contain references to a certain King Minos. Whether it actually refers to Minos of the myths isn’t clear because the tablet is written with the yet undeciphered Linear A Greek script.
It’s hypothesized that there was a King Minos, as in a person just named Minos who was a ruler of Crete, at some point in history and that the following kings of Crete took his name as a way to emulate him and harken back to his legacy.
Egyptian accounts from 1550-1070 BC support this hypothesis. Texts from the era refer to Crete primarily as Kaftu but, sometimes, Menus, possibly an Egyptian way of saying “Minos” as in “the people of Minos” or “Minos’ country”.
As for the Labyrinth that King Minos had Daedalus built, it may not have been real in the physical sense. There’s no evidence that points to there being a literal labyrinth built in Knossos, but the idea of the Labyrinth has been around for ages and seems to have originated with the Egyptian labyrinth built by King Amenemhet III.
So why do the myths themselves specifically say “labyrinth?” Well, we’re forgetting that the tellers of Greek myths were poets and bards, people who were expected to be creative with their words.
The labyrinth could have merely been a figure of speech for “structures and, metaphorically, situations that are hard to escape.” In that sense, Theseus, who was stuck figuring out how to stop the senseless slaughter of his people in a foreign land, was definitely lost in a labyrinth.
What about the Minotaur then? Maybe King Minos’ monstrous not-son was some poor child that just had a genetic disorder?
Thankfully not. Apparently, Minoa culture was dominated by bull-related imagery and traditions. One of these was Minoan bull-jumping, a sport that involved leaping over a bull and vaulting over its horns, momentarily creating the image of bull and man as one. A half-man, half-bull, if you will.
But for closure’s sake, let’s go back to the myth.
The Cretan King’s Gruesome Death
King Minos just can’t catch a break.
Unable to acknowledge the fact that he really started his own problems, King Minos decided that he would hunt down Daedalus. In case you’ve forgotten, Theseus had escaped the Labyrinth, killed the Minotaur, and taken his daughter Ariadne. He possibly would’ve known that Theseus abandoned his daughter on the island of Naxos. It’s not like ancient Greece was that disconnected.
But what does he do? Instead of looking for his daughter, he comes up with a way to find Daedalus. He tells all of Greece that he’ll give the treasure if they can string a thread through a conch shell.
King Cocalus then realizes that this is a chance to make money off of his new guest, Daedalus. He has Daedalus solve it and, in the process, rat himself out. King Minos sails to Sicily to get back his prized inventor but King Cocalus deceives him into taking a bath first to relax.
Cocalus didn’t tell him it was hot enough to boil a man to death.
It wasn’t all that bad for King Minos. These days, he’s down in the underworld, working as one of the judges of the dead.
