Athens, in the story, owes Crete a tribute of young men and women, sent at intervals to be given to the Minotaur in the labyrinth under the palace at Knossos. Theseus, the king's son, puts himself in the group. In Crete Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, falls in love with him and gives him a thread to unwind as he goes in, which is how anyone finds their way out of a maze. He kills the Minotaur, follows the thread back, and sails.
The rest of it is a sequence of things going wrong. Ariadne is abandoned on Naxos, in some versions because Dionysus claims her and in others for no reason anyone has excused. Theseus had agreed with his father Aegeus to hoist a white sail on the return if he was alive, and he forgets and comes home under black; his father, watching from the cliff, throws himself into the sea that has carried his name ever since.
The tale has the shape of a young man's initiation, and its Cretan setting has attracted archaeological speculation ever since a palace with a complicated ground plan and a great deal of bull imagery was excavated at Knossos. What the excavation shows is a Bronze Age palace culture in which bulls mattered; it does not show a Minotaur, and the atlas records the resonance without converting it into evidence.