ABSTRACT
Son of Zeus and Europa. He became king of Crete after a dispute with his brothers Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, who left the country and went elsewhere, Sarpedon to Lycia and Rhadamanthys to Boeotia. (According to one story the three had quarrelled over the handsome Miletus, whom each of them loved.) The three brothers had been adopted by Asterius, the former king, to whom Zeus had married Europa after he had made love to her. The quarrel for the succession was settled when Minos prayed to Poseidon for a worthy sacrificial victim, and the god sent him a magnificent bull from the sea. Minos’ claim to the throne was vindicated, but the bull was so handsome that Minos neglected to sacrifice it. Indeed, his wife Pasiphae, the daughter of Helios, fell in love with the animal, and the exiled Athenian craftsman Daedalus built a hollow image of a cow in which she hid; whereupon the bull mounted her. Some said that this was the vengeance of Poseidon for Minos’ failure to sacrifice the animal, others that Aphrodite caused Pasiphae to conceive her unnatural passion because of Helios’ treacherous spying on herself and Ares. Pasiphae had many children by Minos: Catreus, Deucalion, Glaucus, Androgeos, Acacallis, Ariadne, Phaedra, and Xenodice. Now, however, she bore a monster, the bull’s son, which had the body of a man and a bull’s head. It was called Minotauros, ‘the bull of Minos’. Minos then commissioned Daedalus, who was living at his court, to build an underground maze at Cnossus: the Labyrinth, in which the Minotaur was shut away.
