King Minos and the Minotaur

The Minoans who lived on Crete were named after a legendary king named Minos. The Minoans told this story about Minos:

inos was a son of the god Zeus, the chief of all the gods.

But this shining palace concealed a dark secret. Below the foundation of the palace, in a maze so twisty and complicated that no one could find the way in or out, lived a horrible monster—the Minotaur. The Minotaur lived in the dark, but people whispered that he was half man and half bull—and that he ate human beings.

King Minos didn’t want to feed his own people to the Minotaur, so he ordered the nearby city of Athens to send him victims for the Minotaur’s dinner. Every year, Athens had to send seven girls and seven boys to King Minos, or else (he threatened) he would destroy their city. Year after year, the Athenians sent this dreadful tribute to Minos. They put the names of all the boys and girls of Athens into a bowl, and picked out fourteen unlucky victims, then put them on a ship and took them to Crete. And year after year, the seven girls and seven boys disappeared and were never seen again.

On his eighteenth birthday, Theseus, the son of the king of Athens, decided to walk down to the seaside. The sea was blue, the sky was clear, and the sun shone. But the beach was full of weeping fathers and mothers, and the ship drawn up to the shore had black sails.

“Why does the ship have black sails?” Theseus asked. “Why are you all crying?”

“Because our sons and daughters are going to Crete,” one mother answered him. “They’ll be eaten by the Minotaur, and we’ll never see them again.”

Theseus was horrified! “Why didn’t I know about this?” he demanded.

“Because you are the prince,” another father told him. “Your name is never put into the bowl with the names of all the other young people of Athens! You’ll never have to go to Crete and face the Minotaur.”

“But that’s not right!” Theseus said. “Let me go to Crete in the place of one of the young men. I’ll face the Minotaur, and try to kill him. If I succeed, we’ll put a white sail on this ship instead of the black one, and sail home to Athens. And no one will ever have to be sacrificed as tribute to King Minos again.”

Theseus’s father, King Aegeus, begged him not to go. But Theseus was determined, and in the end he had his way. He sailed to Crete with the other victims.

On the shore of Crete, they were greeted by the cruel King Minos himself, with his beautiful daughter Ariadne walking meekly behind him. “More food for the Minotaur!” King Minos said, with a great laugh. “Tonight, you’ll visit the bull-man in the Labyrinth, his maze beneath my palace!”

He sent the fourteen victims to the prisons of Knossos to wait for nightfall. But Ariadne had fallen in love with Theseus at first sight. Just before dark, she found a torch, a sword, and a ball of wool, and crept secretly out of King Minos’s palace, down to Theseus’s prison cell. “Theseus!” she whispered. “Do you want to kill the Minotaur?”

“Yes!” Theseus answered. “But how can I? He lives at the center of the Labyrinth, and no one who gets into that maze can ever get out again.”

“I’ve brought you a torch to light your way,” Ariadne said, “and a sword to kill the monster. Take this ball of wool and tie it to the doorframe of the Labyrinth. Then drop the ball and let it roll forward. It will lead you to the center of the maze, because the center is the lowest part of the whole Labyrinth. You’ll find the Minotaur sleeping there. Kill it, and then follow the string back out to the doorway.”

She unlocked the door of the cell and let Theseus out. He did as she told him, making his way through the dark passages of the Labyrinth with his torch throwing strange shadows all around him and the ball of wool rolling steadily forward in front of him.

Theseus started forward, but the monster woke and leaped from his sofa with a roar. They fought together for hours, until finally Theseus struck the Minotaur dead with his sword. Then he made his way back up to the entrance of the Labyrinth, following the wool string until he saw the door to the outside up ahead of him.

Ariadne had already released his thirteen friends. Together, they slipped away to the harbor, boarded their ship, and set sail for Athens. They sailed into the harbor of Athens just as the sun rose over the city.

But in their haste, they had forgotten to put a white sail on their ship! The people of Athens came forward to meet them, but although some were rejoicing, others were weeping. “Your Highness,” one of them said to Theseus, “your father the king was waiting for you, on top of that far distant cliff. When the sun struck the sails of your ship, and he saw that the sails were black, he thought that you were dead. So he threw himself off the cliff and into the water. You are now the king of Athens.”

Theseus was crowned king of Athens, but it was a bitter celebration for him. He built a monument to his father in the harbor of Athens. And he named the water around Athens the Aegean Sea, in memory of his father Aegeus. It is still called the Aegean Sea today.