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    LITERATURE

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    Jamae Laagen
    The document provides a literary analysis of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It summarizes the key events of the myth, including that the Minotaur was born half-man and half-bull and lived in the vast Labyrinth built by Daedalus on Crete. Every nine years, Athens was forced to send seven boys and seven girls as sacrifices to the Minotaur. Theseus volunteered as one of the tributes and received help from Ariadne in the form of a ball of string to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. However, Theseus later abandoned Ariadne. The myth inspired ideas around mazes and following clues and also

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    LITERATURE

    Uploaded by

    Jamae Laagen
    79 views2 pages
    The document provides a literary analysis of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It summarizes the key events of the myth, including that the Minotaur was born half-man and half-bull and lived in the vast Labyrinth built by Daedalus on Crete. Every nine years, Athens was forced to send seven boys and seven girls as sacrifices to the Minotaur. Theseus volunteered as one of the tributes and received help from Ariadne in the form of a ball of string to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. However, Theseus later abandoned Ariadne. The myth inspired ideas around mazes and following clues and also

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    The document provides a literary analysis of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It summarizes the key events of the myth, including that the Minotaur was born half-man and half-bull and lived in the vast Labyrinth built by Daedalus on Crete. Every nine years, Athens was forced to send seven boys and seven girls as sacrifices to the Minotaur. Theseus volunteered as one of the tributes and received help from Ariadne in the form of a ball of string to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. However, Theseus later abandoned Ariadne. The myth inspired ideas around mazes and following clues and also

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    79 views2 pages

    LITERATURE

    Uploaded by

    Jamae Laagen
    The document provides a literary analysis of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It summarizes the key events of the myth, including that the Minotaur was born half-man and half-bull and lived in the vast Labyrinth built by Daedalus on Crete. Every nine years, Athens was forced to send seven boys and seven girls as sacrifices to the Minotaur. Theseus volunteered as one of the tributes and received help from Ariadne in the form of a ball of string to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. However, Theseus later abandoned Ariadne. The myth inspired ideas around mazes and following clues and also

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Literary Analysis on the Story ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ Myth by Warwick Hutton

    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.

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