and that perhaps the myth itself is a distillation of even darker, more ancient legends. In the classical version, the Minotaur was a ferocious monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull (although it is occasionally described, as by Dante, as having a man's head and a bull's body), born of the unnatural coupling of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, with a white bull that Poseidon brought out of the sea. The Minotaur was imprisoned in the famous Labyrinth—built by Daedalus, master craftsman of Greek mythology, who had also built the apparatus used to enable the Queen to satisfy her passion for the white bull—and fed a steady diet of hapless human victims, including a levy of seven youths and seven maidens extorted annually from the Athenians. At last, Theseus, son of the King of Athens, who had volunteered to be part of the yearly levy, found his way to the heart of the Labyrinth, guided by a trail of thread left behind by his lover Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan King. Theseus is said to have killed the Minotaur with a sword also supplied by the helpful Ariadne ...
