Minotaur
The bull-headed man of Greek myth: the son of Queen Pasiphae of Crete and a bull, shut in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built, and killed there by Theseus.
Meaning
The Minotaur (MIN-uh-tawr, as Dictionary.com respells it) is Crete’s monster in the story of Theseus. Apollodorus gives him a name of his own, Asterius, and describes him exactly: “He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human.” Ovid calls him “the two-formed monster” and “the double figure of a bull and of a youth”. Encyclopaedia Britannica sums him up the same way, “the body of a man and the head of a bull”. Today he belongs to the retellings of the Theseus myth, such as Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die (1958).
Origin and history
Apollodorus tells the story from its start. Minos of Crete did not sacrifice the bull Poseidon sent him, so the god made the animal savage and made Pasiphae, Minos’s wife, fall in love with it. The craftsman Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow covered with a real cowhide and set it in the bull’s meadow; she gave birth to Asterius, “who was called the Minotaur”, and Minos, following oracles, shut him in the Labyrinth. His translator James Frazer noted that Apollodorus seems to follow a lost play by Euripides, The Cretans, in which Pasiphae pleads that her passion was a madness Poseidon sent.
Britannica records the tribute that fed him: seven Athenian youths and seven maidens every ninth year, or every year in another version. Theseus went with them. Ariadne, the king’s daughter, gave him a clue, a ball of thread, which he tied to the door and unwound as he went in. Apollodorus says he found the Minotaur in the furthest part of the Labyrinth and killed him “by smiting him with his fists”, then followed the thread out again.
The Labyrinth
Ovid says Minos wanted to hide the disgrace of his house, so he had Daedalus build “a habitation of many divisions, and an abode full of mazes”, its passages turning back on themselves like the river Maeander winding through the Phrygian fields. The labyrinth page follows the shape itself, from Cretan coins to church floors.
How he died
Apollodorus has Theseus kill him with his bare fists in the last part of the Labyrinth. Ovid passes over the fight: the monster had already been fed Athenian blood twice, chosen by lot every nine years, when the third group came, and the way out was found again “by the aid of the maiden, by means of the thread”.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeCentaurA creature of Greek myth with a man’s head, arms and chest on a horse’s body, best known from the centaurs’ drunken fight with the Lapiths and from Cheiron, the wise centaur who taught Achilles.
- The Labyrinth Daedalus built to hold the MinotaurLabyrinthA single path that winds back and forth to a centre and out again. In Greek myth it was the building Daedalus made at Knossos to hold the Minotaur; medieval churches laid it in their floors, and the Chartres labyrinth of about 1205 to 1215 is still walked.
See also
Chimera, Hydra, Harpy, Siren, Pegasus, Griffin.
Sources
- Apollodorus, Library 3.1.4 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (1921), 3.1.4, with Frazer’s notes, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Library 3.1.4 and Frazer’s notes 1 and 3
- Apollodorus, Epitome 1.9 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (1921), Epitome 1.9, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Epitome 1.9
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV (tr. Henry T. Riley), Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Henry T. Riley (1851), Project Gutenberg eBook #26073, Project Gutenberg, Book VIII, the Labyrinth
- Minotaur (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Minotaur”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
- Minotaur (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Minotaur” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry and pronunciation
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
Added .