Minos

Minos was born on Crete to Zeus and Europa, the princess Zeus carried over the sea in the shape of a bull in the abduction of Europa. Homer's Iliad already knows the pedigree. Zeus names the daughter of Phoenix who bore him Minos and Rhadamanthys. The Cretan warrior Idomeneus boasts that Zeus fathered Minos to watch over Crete. Apollodorus adds a third brother, Sarpedon, while noting that Homer makes Sarpedon a son of Laodamia instead. The Cretan king Asterius married Europa and raised her sons. When the brothers quarrelled over a boy named Miletus, Minos won and the others fled. Herodotus tells the quarrel as a fight over the kingship, which ended with Sarpedon's followers settling in Lycia.

Apollodorus makes the Cretan throne the start of his trouble. Asterius died childless and Minos's claim was opposed, so he said the gods had given him the kingdom and would grant whatever he prayed for. He asked Poseidon to send a bull from the sea and promised to sacrifice it. Poseidon sent the Cretan Bull, and Minos won the kingdom. Then he sent the animal to his herds and sacrificed another.

The god answered by making the bull savage and making Minos's wife Pasiphae, a daughter of the Sun, fall in love with it. Daedalus, an Athenian exile, built her a hollow wooden cow, and she bore the Minotaur. Minos, following certain oracles, shut the creature in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built. Apollodorus lists his sons by Pasiphae as Catreus, Deucalion, Glaucus and Androgeus, and his daughters as Acalle, Xenodice, Ariadne and Phaedra.

The war with Athens began with a dead son. Apollodorus says Androgeus beat every competitor at the Panathenaic games, and King Aegeus then sent him against the bull of Marathon, which killed him. Others said jealous rivals ambushed him on the road to Thebes. Minos heard the news while sacrificing to the Graces on Paros. He finished the rite without garland or flute, and the islanders kept that custom afterwards.

Being master of the sea, Minos attacked with a fleet and captured Megara. There Scylla, daughter of King Nisus, fell in love with him and pulled out the purple hair that kept her father alive. Apollodorus says Minos repaid her by tying her feet to his ship's stern and drowning her. When Athens still held out, he prayed to Zeus for revenge, and famine and plague struck the city. An oracle told the Athenians to give Minos whatever satisfaction he chose. He demanded seven youths and seven maidens as food for the Minotaur. That tribute ended only when Theseus killed the monster, as told in Theseus and the Minotaur.

Theseus escaped the maze because Ariadne, on Daedalus's advice, gave him a thread. Apollodorus's Epitome says Minos, learning of the flight, shut Daedalus and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth, which set up the fall of Icarus. Daedalus flew on to Camicus in Sicily.

Minos hunted the craftsman from country to country carrying a spiral shell. He promised a great reward to anyone who could pass a thread through it, knowing only Daedalus could. At the court of King Cocalus the shell came back threaded, because Daedalus had tied the thread to an ant. Minos demanded his surrender. Cocalus promised it and held a feast, but after his bath Minos was killed by the daughters of Cocalus. Some said boiling water was poured over him. Herodotus also says Minos died a violent death in Sicily while searching for Daedalus. He adds that the Cretans later besieged Camicus for five years to avenge him and failed.

Minos the judge of the dead is older in the sources than most of his crimes. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus sees him in the house of Hades, seated with a golden scepter while the dead gather round to ask him for judgment. Homer does not say he sorts the good from the wicked. He settles the disputes of the shades, as a king settles disputes among the living.

Later writers widened the office. Apollodorus says Rhadamanthys judges in Hades along with Minos. Plato's Gorgias names three judges of the underworld, Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus, and gives Minos the final decision whenever the other two are in doubt. Virgil's Aeneid places him beside the souls condemned by unjust verdicts, shaking the urn of judgment and hearing the story of each life.

The ancient verdict on his character split along a line that ran through Athens. Homer's Odyssey calls Cnossus the city where Minos reigned and held converse with great Zeus. The Greek word for the timing is ambiguous. It can mean nine years or every ninth year, and Murray's translation even makes him king at nine years old. Plato's dialogue Minos reads it as a visit to Zeus's cave every ninth year to learn law. The same dialogue calls Minos the best of ancient lawgivers, with Rhadamanthys guarding his laws in the city and Talos across the rest of Crete. It blames Attic tragedy for his name as a harsh and unjust king, revenge for the tribute. Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes the same complaint and recalls Hesiod calling him the most royal Minos.

Diodorus Siculus answers the tension another way. He splits Minos into two kings: a first Minos, son of Zeus and Europa, and his grandson, a second Minos, who first built a great navy and married Pasiphae.

Greek historians treated Minos as the first ruler of the sea. Herodotus says the Carians once manned ships for him. He calls Polycrates the first Greek to aim at mastery of the sea. But he sets aside Minos of Cnossus as belonging to an age before what may be called the human race. Thucydides opens his history with Minos as the earliest known builder of a navy. He cleared the sea of pirates and set his sons over the Cyclades as governors.

Minos gave his name to a whole civilization. The archaeologist Arthur Evans, excavating the palace at Knossos from 1900, called the Bronze Age culture of Crete Minoan after the legendary king. The palace's winding ground plan and its many double axes, the labrys, encouraged a modern theory that the Labyrinth story remembers the building itself. That link is a modern reading of the ruins, not a claim any ancient source makes.