Athens, forced to send fourteen youths every nine years to be fed to the bull-headed Minotaur imprisoned in the Cretan labyrinth, is freed of the tribute when the Athenian prince Theseus volunteers, sails to Crete, and with the help of the Cretan princess Ariadne's thread finds his way into the labyrinth, kills the Minotaur, and finds his way back out. The story is also an origin account for the black sail that, forgotten in the excitement of victory, leads Theseus's father Aegeus to believe his son dead and to throw himself into the sea that bears his name.
Facts
History
Historical NoteBefore sailing for Crete, Theseus is said to have already proven himself on the road from Troezen to Athens by defeating a series of bandits and monsters, among them Procrustes, who forced travelers onto an iron bed and either stretched or cut them to fit it, a cycle of feats establishing his heroic credentials before the Minotaur story begins. 1 Historical NoteEven Ariadne's fate after the abandonment is told inconsistently: most sources have Dionysus find and marry her on Naxos, some making her immortal and some not, while Plutarch also records a darker variant in which she hangs herself in grief, and Pseudo-Apollodorus's own account has Dionysus carry her off rather than marry her. 1 Historical NoteSources differ on whether Theseus and Aegeus had actually agreed on a white sail as the signal of success, which Theseus then simply forgets to raise in the excitement of the voyage home, or whether the forgetting is itself read as punishment sent by a god Theseus had failed to honor properly during the journey. 1 Meaning
Central MotifA thread guides the hero out of a maze built to trap him 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteSome modern scholars connect the Minotaur and labyrinth tradition to genuine memories of Bronze Age Crete, where the palace complex at Knossos, with its maze like plan and bull imagery, was excavated by Arthur Evans in the early twentieth century. 1 Scholarly NoteThe labyrinth itself is credited to the craftsman Daedalus, commissioned by King Minos to build a maze inescapable enough to contain the Minotaur, and it is the same architect's own later escape from Crete on wings of his own making, with his son Icarus, that connects the Minotaur story to one of Greek myth's other well known tales of ingenuity and downfall. 1 Text
Source TextPseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeAncient sources disagree on why Theseus abandons Ariadne on Naxos after the escape from Crete: some say he tired of her or fell for another woman, others that he simply forgot her, and others that the gods commanded him to leave her behind because she was destined to marry Dionysus. 1 Sources
Primary SourcePseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca, its true authorship and precise date both unknown despite the traditional attribution to the second century BCE scholar Apollodorus of Athens, is the source that gathers the fullest connected version of the story, later than the artistic tradition it draws together. 1 Learn More
The Tribute and the Thread
After Athens loses a war with Crete, King Minos imposes a recurring tribute: every nine years, fourteen Athenian youths, seven young men and seven young women, must be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head on a man's body born to Minos's wife Pasiphae after a curse from Poseidon, and confined within an elaborate labyrinth built by the craftsman Daedalus specifically so that anyone who enters cannot find their way back out. When the third tribute comes due, Prince Theseus volunteers to go among the intended victims, over his father King Aegeus's objections, intending to kill the Minotaur and end the tribute for good.
Arriving in Crete, Theseus wins the love of Minos's daughter Ariadne, who secretly gives him a ball of thread to unwind as he enters the labyrinth, so that he can retrace his path back out after finding and killing the Minotaur. The plan succeeds: Theseus kills the Minotaur, follows the thread back to the entrance, and escapes Crete with Ariadne and the other freed Athenian youths.
The Minotaur's existence was itself a punishment: Minos had once asked Poseidon for a magnificent bull as a sign of favor, promising to sacrifice it back to the god, but kept the bull for himself because of its beauty, and Poseidon retaliated by making Minos's wife Pasiphae fall in love with it, a union Daedalus made possible by building her a hollow wooden cow to hide inside, and from which the Minotaur was born nine months later.
Abandonment, the Black Sail, and a Father's Death
On the voyage home, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos, for reasons ancient sources give variously as forgetfulness, a directive from a god who wanted her for himself, since Dionysus later marries her there, or simple faithlessness on Theseus's part; the episode is told with considerably more sympathy for Ariadne in some retellings than others. Preoccupied with these events, Theseus forgets to carry out an arrangement made with his father before departing Athens: if the mission succeeded, the ship was to raise white sails on its return instead of the black sails it had sailed out under as a mark of mourning.
Watching from a clifftop for his son's ship, Aegeus sees the black sails still flying and, believing Theseus dead, throws himself into the sea, which is said to take its name, the Aegean, from his death. Theseus returns victorious to find himself king of Athens through his own father's grief-stricken suicide, a detail that gives the story of his triumph a somber, guilt-laden coda rather than a clean happy ending, and one later writers, including in the version preserved in Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca, treat as part of the same continuous narrative rather than a separate misfortune.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Belongs to Tradition
Originated In
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.