Asterion, king of Crete

Also Known As: Greek Asteríōn, also Asterios or Asterius; Teutamus is a variant spelling of his father’s name; the name means “starry”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A mortal king with no powers of his own, whose one great act was to take in a bride already carrying the children of Zeus.
Role in Mythos: He is the king of Crete who married Europa after the bull brought her across the sea and raised Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon as his heirs, which makes him the hinge between Europa’s abduction and the reign of Minos.
Relation to Humans: As king he stood at the head of the island’s first ruling house in the Greek genealogies, descended from Hellen through Dorus and Tectamus. His death without sons of his own opened the succession quarrel that ended with Minos on the throne.

A bull came out of the sea onto the Cretan shore with a girl on its back, and the girl’s hands smelled of crocus. The oldest version of the tale, preserved from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women by an ancient commentator on the Iliad, says Zeus had seen Europa gathering flowers in a meadow with the nymphs, turned himself into a bull, and breathed a crocus from his mouth to win her trust. He carried her across the water to Crete and lay with her there. Then, the same fragment says, he made her live with Asterion, king of the Cretans.

That is where Asterion enters the story, and nearly where he leaves it. He is one of the quietest figures in Greek myth: a king whose whole surviving biography fits on a page, and whose part in it was to stand still while the gods moved around him. He took the woman a god had finished with. He raised the god’s sons. He died. The story then belongs to someone else.

The record of him is thin but consistent, and it comes from several hands across a thousand years. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the first century BC, gives him a pedigree. Tectamus, son of Dorus, son of Hellen, son of Deucalion, sailed to Crete with a following of Aeolians and Pelasgians and made himself king of the island. He married a daughter of Cretheus and had a son, Asterius. It was while Asterius reigned, Diodorus says, that Zeus carried Europa over from Phoenicia on the back of a bull and fathered three sons on her: Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon. Some time after, the king took Europa as his wife.

The Library attributed to Apollodorus puts it in one plain line: Asterius, prince of the Cretans, married Europa and brought up her children. The epic poet Nonnus, late in antiquity, has Zeus pass his pregnant bride on to Asterion and calls the king a consort of rich fortune. It is hard to say whether Nonnus meant that kindly. The sources do not agree on who Europa’s father was, Phoenix in the Hesiodic fragment and Agenor in Apollodorus, but they agree on the king who received her.

What kind of household that was, nobody wrote down. The tellings give no scene of Asterion meeting his wife or speaking to the boys. The hall would have been full of bronze and lamp smoke and three sons who were not his, growing up in a palace that was. One gift from the bull went with Europa into that house, according to a papyrus fragment of the same Hesiodic poem: a golden necklace, made by Hephaestus and handed down to Zeus, which the god gave her as he left.

Every source makes the same point about the marriage. It produced no son. Diodorus says Asterius had no children by Europa, adopted the sons of Zeus, and left them the kingdom at his death. Apollodorus says that when Asterius died childless, Minos wanted to reign over Crete and found his claim opposed. That opposition is what sent Minos to pray to Poseidon for a bull from the sea as proof that the gods approved of him, and it is what set off everything that followed: the bull he failed to sacrifice, the passion Poseidon sent on Pasiphae, the wooden cow built by Daedalus, the creature in the Labyrinth. The brothers had already fallen out over a boy named Miletus. Minos won. Sarpedon went to Lycia, and Rhadamanthys ended up judging the dead.

One variant cuts against the childless king. Apollodorus records that Asclepiades named Minos’s wife not as Pasiphae but as Crete, daughter of Asterius. In that version the old king had a daughter after all, and his stepson married her. The two traditions were never reconciled, and Apollodorus simply sets one beside the other.

The name did not die with him. When Pasiphae gave birth to the bull-headed child, Apollodorus says, she named him Asterius, and he was the one called the Minotaur. Pausanias, travelling through Troezen in the second century AD, saw a temple of Artemis the Saviour that Theseus was said to have founded on his return from Crete, after overcoming Asterion the son of Minos. So the starry name passed from a quiet king to the monster in the maze, inside the same royal house. No ancient writer says whether the monster was named after the king, or whether the Cretans simply liked the word.

They were not the only ones. In the Argolid a river called Asterion ran above the great sanctuary of Hera before dropping into a cleft and vanishing underground, cold water swallowed by rock. Pausanias heard that this river had three daughters, Euboea, Prosymna and Acraea, who nursed the goddess, and that a plant growing on its banks was also called asterion. That river has nothing to do with the king of Crete except the word, which means starry and seems to have been a name the Greeks reached for easily.

Asterion’s strength, in the end, was the strength of a man who held a throne and kept it warm. He gave three half-divine boys a royal father, a palace and a legitimate claim, and that adoption is the only reason the son of Zeus could call himself king of Crete. His weakness was the same fact turned round. With no son of his blood, his death left the island open, and the contest for it pulled Poseidon, a bull and a buried monster into Cretan history. He was the last king of Crete before the Labyrinth, and nobody thought to describe him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Asterion in Greek mythology?

Asterion, also called Asterius, was a mortal king of Crete who married Europa after Zeus carried her to the island in the form of a bull. He raised her three sons by Zeus, Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, as his own heirs. Diodorus Siculus makes him the son of Tectamus, a descendant of Hellen who settled Crete with Aeolians and Pelasgians.

Is Asterion the same as the Minotaur?

No, they are two different figures who share a name. Asterion the king was Europa’s husband and Minos’s stepfather. The Minotaur, born to Minos’s wife Pasiphae, was also named Asterius according to Apollodorus, and Pausanias calls the creature Theseus overcame Asterion the son of Minos.

Did Asterion have any children?

Asterion had no children with Europa, and both Diodorus and Apollodorus say he died childless and left Crete to her sons by Zeus. A variant recorded by Apollodorus from Asclepiades gives him a daughter named Crete, who in that version became the wife of Minos instead of Pasiphae.

How did Minos become king after Asterion?

When Asterion died without a son, Minos claimed the throne of Crete but his claim was opposed. Minos prayed to Poseidon to send a bull from the sea as a sign of divine favour, and the bull he then failed to sacrifice led to the birth of the Minotaur.

What does the name Asterion mean?

Asterion means “starry” in ancient Greek. Besides the king of Crete, the name was used for the Minotaur and for a river in the Argolid that flowed above the sanctuary of Hera and was said to have three daughters who nursed the goddess.