Who defeated the Minotaur?

The myth step by step

Ancient writers such as Plutarch and Ovid told the story in slightly different ways, but the main events are these:

1. King Minos of Crete was supposed to sacrifice a beautiful white bull to Poseidon but kept it. As punishment, his wife gave birth to the Minotaur.
2. Minos had the inventor Daedalus build a vast maze, the Labyrinth, to hold the monster.
3. After his son died in Athens, Minos forced the Athenians to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete every few years to be fed to the Minotaur.
4. Theseus volunteered to go, promising to kill the beast.
5. Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him a ball of thread, which he unwound as he walked into the Labyrinth.
6. Theseus killed the Minotaur, often said to be with his bare hands or a sword, and followed the thread back out.

How the Aegean Sea got its name

Theseus had promised his father, King Aegeus, to change his ship’s black sails to white if he survived. He forgot. Seeing the black sails from a cliff, Aegeus thought his son was dead and threw himself into the sea, which was named the Aegean after him.

What happened to Ariadne?

Theseus took Ariadne with him but abandoned her on the island of Naxos. In many versions, the god Dionysus found and married her.

Is there a real Labyrinth?

The myth may be linked to the vast palace of Knossos on Crete, excavated by Arthur Evans in the early 1900s. Its maze-like rooms and the Minoan bull-leaping art may have inspired the story. The civilization is named “Minoan” after King Minos.

“Ariadne’s thread” today

The phrase means a method for solving a complicated problem step by step, especially by retracing your path.

Athena was Theseus’s patron city’s goddess; see who the Greek goddess of wisdom was. For another Greek myth, read about Atlas holding up the sky.