Theseus and the Minotaur

Every nine years, Athens was forced to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete as tribute to King Minos. The captives were cast into the Labyrinth, a vast underground maze designed by the master craftsman Daedalus, where the Minotaur - a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull - hunted and devoured them. When the third tribute came due, Theseus, son of King Aegeus, volunteered to go as one of the victims, intending to end the slaughter. Upon arriving in Crete, Theseus caught the eye of Ariadne, Minos's daughter. She fell in love with the hero and secretly gave him a ball of thread and a sword. Theseus tied one end of the thread to the entrance of the Labyrinth and unspooled it as he ventured deeper into the maze. In the heart of the Labyrinth, he found the Minotaur and fought it in close combat, slaying the beast with his bare hands or the sword Ariadne had provided. Following the thread back, Theseus emerged from the maze and led the other Athenian captives to freedom. He fled Crete with Ariadne by ship, though he later abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Approaching Athens, Theseus forgot to change his ship's black sails to white - the signal to his father that he had survived. Seeing the black sails, Aegeus threw himself into the sea in grief, and the waters were named the Aegean in his memory.

Plutarch, writing centuries later as a biographer rather than a mythographer, treats the story as a garbled memory of something closer to history: he reports a tradition in which the Labyrinth was an ordinary prison, the Minotaur an athletic captain named Taurus whom the Athenian youths were made to fight in games, and Ariadne's help a matter of court politics rather than magic. He records this alongside the traditional version without fully endorsing either, which is itself evidence of how unsettled the story already was by his own time.