Minos

At the edge of the world of the dead, a bearded king sits on a stone throne with a golden scepter laid across his knees, and the souls come to him in a line that has no end. Each one stops and gives account of the life it led. He listens. Then he sends it on: to the soft meadows of Elysium, or down the long drop into Tartarus, or out into the grey middle country where most of the dead simply go. Minos holds the deciding voice, and he has held it since he stopped being a living man.

He had not always dealt in souls. Before the throne in the dark he was a king of Crete, and before that a boy carried across the sea in the arms of a god. His mother was Europa, a Phoenician princess whom Zeus, wearing the shape of a gentle white bull, coaxed onto his back and swam away with to Crete. She bore the god three sons. Minos was the eldest, and he grew up wanting the island for himself.

To prove the throne was his by right, he asked Poseidon for a sign: a bull to rise out of the sea that he would then give back to the god in sacrifice. The water broke and a bull came ashore, white as sea-foam and finer than any beast in Crete. Minos looked at it and could not bear to kill it. He sacrificed a lesser animal and kept the splendid one for his herds, and thought the god would not notice the difference. The god noticed.

Poseidon’s answer went through the king’s own house. He made Pasiphae, Minos’s wife, burn with a monstrous longing for the white bull, and she went to the craftsman Daedalus, who built her a hollow wooden cow to hide inside. From that union came the Minotaur, a thing with a man’s body and a bull’s head, bellowing and always hungry. Minos could not undo his wife’s shame and he could not let it roam loose, so he set Daedalus to raise a prison of corridors so tangled that whatever went in could never find the way out. They called it the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur lived at its center.

Grief sharpened the king into something crueler. When his son Androgeus was killed on a visit to Athens, Minos made war and won, and set the Athenians a price. Every nine years they would send seven young men and seven young women across the sea to be put into the Labyrinth and left for the Minotaur. Twice the ship went out under a black sail. The third time a volunteer was aboard, Theseus, son of the Athenian king, and the daughter of Minos undid her own father’s work. Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread to unwind behind him, so that when he had killed the thing at the heart of the maze he could follow the line back into the light. He sailed home with her, and with the fourteen who were meant to die.

Minos turned on the man who had built both the cow and the maze. He shut Daedalus and his son Icarus in a high tower, or by some tellings in the Labyrinth itself, but a builder that clever is hard to hold. Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax, and the two of them went out through the air. Icarus flew too near the sun, the wax softened, and he dropped into the sea that still carries his name. Daedalus reached Sicily and the shelter of King Cocalus. Minos came after him, carrying a spiral seashell and offering a reward to anyone who could run a thread through its whole length, certain that only Daedalus was cunning enough to solve it. Cocalus took the shell to Daedalus, who tied a thread to an ant and coaxed it winding through. When the threaded shell came back, Minos knew his man was there and demanded him. He never got him. In the bath that Cocalus’s daughters drew for their guest, the water came scalding, and the king who had fed children to a monster died in a stranger’s tub.

That is one Minos. There is another, and the ancient world could never quite fit the two together. This other Minos was the wisest king Crete ever had, a lawgiver who climbed every nine years to a cave on the mountain and came down with statutes he said came straight from Zeus, his father. Homer calls him the companion of great Zeus. He was remembered as the first man to build a true navy, to sweep the pirates from the Aegean and rule the islands scattered across it, the earliest sea-power anyone could name. Later writers, unable to square the just king with the tyrant of the tribute, decided there must have been two men of the name, a grandfather and a grandson, and split the record between them. The stories themselves never made the cut so cleanly.

What he looked like alive, no one troubled to set down. He survives instead as an emblem: the seated figure, the beard, the raised scepter of a man deciding another’s fate. The oldest picture of him is already the judge, not the boy or the warrior, as though the tradition had agreed that the throne in the underworld was the truest thing about him.

His powers were the powers of a king and a son of Zeus. He commanded the sea and the islands on it, he gave laws that men kept for generations, and he took counsel from a god face to face. Death did not end his authority but confirmed it, handing him a jurisdiction larger than Crete had ever been. And yet almost nothing he built stayed built. His wife betrayed him with a bull, his daughter betrayed him for a foreigner, his prisoner walked out through the sky, and his own pride over a single fine animal set the whole ruin in motion. He can weigh any soul that comes before him with perfect judgment. His own he seems never to have weighed at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Minos in Greek mythology?

Minos was a king of Crete in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and the Phoenician princess Europa. He was famous as a powerful sea-king and lawgiver in life and, after his death, became one of the judges of the dead in the underworld. He is also the king behind the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth.

Why was the Minotaur born during Minos’s reign?

The Minotaur was born because Minos angered the god Poseidon. Minos had prayed for a magnificent white bull to sacrifice, but when the bull rose from the sea he kept it for himself instead of killing it. In revenge, Poseidon made Minos’s wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull, and their offspring was the Minotaur, which Minos imprisoned in the Labyrinth.

What tribute did Minos demand from Athens?

After his son Androgeus was killed in Athens, Minos went to war and forced the Athenians to send a tribute of seven young men and seven young women every nine years. These youths were put into the Labyrinth to be devoured by the Minotaur. The tribute ended when the Athenian hero Theseus killed the Minotaur with the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne.

How did Minos die?

Minos died in Sicily while hunting the fugitive craftsman Daedalus. He tracked Daedalus to the court of King Cocalus using a riddle about threading a spiral seashell. When Cocalus’s daughters drew Minos a bath, they killed him by pouring scalding water over him.

Why is Minos a judge of the dead?

Because of his reputation for justice and wisdom as a lawgiver on Crete, Minos was made a judge of the dead in the Greek underworld after he died. Alongside Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, he decides the fate of souls, and Homer and later writers describe him seated with a golden scepter passing sentence on the dead.

Related Entries

Minotaur, Cretan Bull, Ariadne, Theseus, Europa, Sarpedon, Rhadamanthus, Talos, Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Tartarus