summary on Theseus and the minotaur
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Answer:
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Explanation:
In the vast Labyrinth on the island of Crete, built by the cunning Daedalus for King Minos, there dwelt the Minotaur: a man with the head and tail of a bull. Every nine years (although the interval varies from telling to telling), Minos demanded seven Athenian men and seven Athenian maidens be given to the Minotaur as sacrifices. This is because Minos had defeated Athens in a war, and demanded the city offer up these tributes as, if you like, the spoils of Minos’ victory. This mythic story, by the way, inspired Suzanne Collins’s idea of ‘tributes’ in The Hunger Games.
The Minotaur was a man with the head of a bull: the product of a rather twisted coupling between Pasiphaë, Minos’ wife, and a ferocious bull that Poseidon had brought out of the sea so that Minos could sacrifice it to him. However, Minos was so taken by the bull – a handsome beast, and useful to have as stud for his cattle – that he sacrificed a different animal and hoped Poseidon wouldn’t notice.
It’s always a bad idea to hope that a god won’t notice your trickery, and sure enough, Poseidon wasn’t fooled. So he made the bull so savage that it was a menace to Minos, and Pasiphaë, Minos’ wife, desired the bull. She asked Daedelus, her husband’s master craftsman, to help her with her dilemma, and he created a heifer made of wood and leather (not a wooden horse, then, but a wooden cow) into which Pasiphaë could climb and then … mate with the bull. Whatever floats your boat, eh?
The result of this rather bestial union was the Minotaur, a fierce creature who worried Minos, so he told Daedelus to build a vast palace comprising a maze-like network of corridors and rooms, and then he had the Minotaur placed inside this palace. The palace was named the Labyrinth, a name that has since been applied to countless other mazes, and one film starring David Bowie.
Theseus was a brave Athenian youth who put himself forward as one of the tributes. As he was leaving his home and setting sail for the island of Crete, his father Aegeus gave young Theseus two sets of sails, one black and one white, instructing his son to mount the black sails onto his ship as he sailed away (to reflect the solemn nature of his voyage) and telling him that, if he was successful, he should mount the white sails on his voyage home, so Aegeus would see the ship approaching and know his son had been successful in killing the Minotaur.
Theseus and the other tributes then travelled to Crete and were thrown in the Labyrinth, the palace of the Minotaur. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos and Pasiphaë, clapped eyes on him and promptly fell in love with the Athenian youth. She gave him a ball of thread (of which more below), so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth: as he weaved his way through its various corridors he would unravel the thread on the floor beneath him, allowing him to retrace his journey back out of the maze.
A ball of thread is known as a clew or, in an alternative spelling, a clue. To this day, we talk about following the ‘clues’ to discover something, and it’s all thanks to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Unfortunately, after Ariadne had helped him to accomplish his task, he abandoned her … because Dionysus made him (in some accounts), or because he was in love with someone else (in other accounts).
One final detail in the Theseus story involving the Minotaur concerns his journey home. Having killed the Minotaur, Theseus set sail for home – but forgot to change the black sails for the white ones, as his father had instructed. This meant that Aegeus, waiting at the top of the Acropolis for his son to return, saw the black-sailed ship returning and feared that his son was dead. Aegeus plunged himself into the sea below, and drowned – and this, the myth says, is why that sea is named the Aegean to this day.
Answer:
According to legend, king Minos ruled Athens and forced the Athenians to deliver seven youths and seven maidens every nine years. They became prey of the Minotaur in the labyrinth, and Athens escaped further sanctions through their obedience.