To confine the Minotaur, Minos asked Daedalus to construct the Labyrinth near his palace in Knossos. But even worse than that, he was a living reminder of Minos’ defiance of the gods and Pasiphae’s great sin.Īrchitect of the Labyrinth Details from the painting Theseus and the Minotaur, Maestro di Tavarnelle, 16th century, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon Moreover, the Minotaur was a powerful beast who feasted on human flesh. From the unnatural union of Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon, the Minotaur was born, a terrible creature who had the head of a bull and the body of a human. Pasiphae and the Minotaur, 340-320 BCE, Settecamini Painter, National Library of Franceĭaedalus became the genius behind one of Greek Mythology’s greatest monstrosities. Then he introduced Pasiphae into it and the bull came and coupled with it, as if it were a real cow. He constructed a wooden cow on wheels, took it, hollowed it out in the inside, sewed it up in the hide of a cow which he had skinned, and set it in the meadow in which the bull used to graze. I will leave its description to Apollodorus ( Library 3.1.4): ![]() The bull would just not mate with Pasiphae, so the woman asked for the help of Daedalus, who was living in Minos’ palace at the time.ĭaedalus conceived a plan that was at the same time ingenious and disturbing. But this was a trickier problem than it sounds. The only way to get rid of it was to satisfy the unstoppable urge to mate with the bull. The burden of this divine madness was unbearable. Poseidon cursed the bull to go wild and Pasiphae to fall in love with the animal that Minos had liked so much. Minos had to pay and the god of the ocean threw a truly terrible curse to the Cretan’s house. This was an act of defiance that could not go unpunished. So in his place, Minos offered another bull and kept the one sent by the god. The bull was too beautiful, too strong to be sacrificed. A bull of incomparable beauty made his appearance, but now Minos had second thoughts. ![]() ![]() To prove it, he prayed to Poseidon for a bull to appear from the sea, promising to return the animal as a sacrifice. The story goes that when Minos was establishing his kingship over Crete, he boasted that the gods favored him. Unlike Socrates, we will not believe in these stories to support an argument, but simply because sometimes that is the best way to get the best out of a myth. Let’s also pretend that the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son, who flew using wings made of feathers and wax is true. Let’s pretend that he actually created animate statues and built a labyrinth with a minotaur in its center. Just like Socrates, let’s also pretend to believe in the wonders performed by Daedalus. However, for the sake of argument, he pretended to believe in it. He understood that this story was just… a story. Of course, Socrates (and Plato) was not naïve. Socrates: That if they are not fastened up they play truant and run away but, if fastened, they stay where they are.” Plato, Meno 97d In fact, as Socrates says, Daedalus’ sculptures had to be tied down, because if left unbound, they ran away. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates refers to the old Greek myth that Daedalus, the legendary inventor and sculptor, could create statues so life-like, that they were self-moving. ![]() In the version adapted by Josephine Preston Peabody, the father and son are imprisoned in a tall tower on a seemingly deserted island.Daedalus and Pasiphae, Lemaire-Poussin, 17th century, AKG-Images The Fall of Icarus, Jacob Peter Gowy, after Rubens, Prado, Madrid Surrounding the labyrinth are King Minos’ many guards. In some versions of the myth, Daedalus and his son are imprisoned inside the labyrinth of the dead Minotaur on the island of Crete. More recent tellings of the story include artistic interpretations and poetic explorations of the myth’s themes. The Roman version appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Greeks tell the story in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca. The story of Icarus and Daedalus has been revisited in many forms throughout the centuries.
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