Theseus fighting the Minotaur. By Etienne-Jules Ramey. 1821-1827. Tuileries Garden, Paris • ISTOCKPHOTO "And I, who gave birth to this monster without being in any way guilty", laments Pasiphaé in a tirade of the Cretans of Euripides, a piece dated to the years 430 BC. J.-C. Along with Phèdre, Canacé and Sthénébée, Pasiphaé belongs to the procession of these Euripidean women victims of a passion for which they reject responsibility. Pasiphaé, in love despite herself The culprit is Poseidon, god of the seas, who aroused in her an irrepressible and unnatural desire for a bull; the culprit is her husband Minos, king of Crete, who unleashed Poseidon's anger, but who now dares to blame her and want to "muzzle" her, "lock her up in a dungeon". In an impassioned speech, Pasiphaé sums up the legend that has been running since archaic times about the birth of the Minotaur, this monstrous son whose bull's head personifies the queen's fatal fault. A myth that has known various versions and interpretations. The first literary traces appear in a work attributed to Hesiod, the Catalogue of Women . Poetic fragments evoke the sea, a bull that falls in love, the wife of Minos and a prodigious son who has the body of a man and the head of a bull. It's reading the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus and that of Diodorus of Sicily that we have access to a reconstruction of the whole of history. When the king of Crete, Asterion, dies without a legitimate child, Minos wants to take power. His brothers, Rhadamanthe and Sarpedon, prevent him. Minos tells them that he holds the royalty of the gods well. As proof, his requests are heard by the deities:during a sacrifice to Poseidon, Minos asks him to make a bull appear out of the waves and promises to sacrifice it to him. The god Poseidon takes revenge for a sacrilege committed by Minos, the king of Crete, by instilling in the heart of Queen Pasiphae an all-consuming passion for a bull. But once the white beast is on the shore, Minos seizes the throne and sends the bull to join his herd. Poseidon, furious, exploits Pasiphaé to take revenge on the lying and sacrilegious king:the queen is then in the grip of a devouring passion for the bull. She turns to Daedalus the Athenian, the genius craftsman who stays in Crete after being banished from his homeland because of the murder of his nephew. He builds a wooden heifer for the queen, which he covers with real animal skin and places the decoy in the meadow where Poseidon's bull used to graze. Pasiphaé slips inside and, after having mated with the bull, gives birth to the Minotaur, whom Apollodorus names Asterion. A variant appears in the author Hygin, according to which the queen was guilty of having neglected the goddess Aphrodite:“For this reason, Venus inspired her with a horrible love, following which she fell in love with the bull. » The Maze of Daedalus Long before the literary and iconographic tradition of the Archaic period, Crete is linked to the motif of the bull. The remains of the so-called Minoan period (II th millennium BC. J.-C.) have notably delivered frescoes depicting scenes of capture and games, where the bull is ridden by young girls and boys. This athletic feat of "taurokathapsis", where you had to jump between the horns of a bull, probably took place in the central courtyards of the palaces:in Phaistos and Malia, we have thus identified architectural arrangements to protect the spectators from the movements of the beast. It is possible that the bull was part of the Cretan pantheon. It is also interesting to remember that Asterion was the husband of Europa, this woman raped by Zeus who had taken the form of a bull. She gave birth to three children, Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthe, whom Asterion raised as a foster father after his marriage to Europa. Minos is therefore itself the result of an interspecific union. After the birth of the Minotaur, Minos locks the monster in a labyrinth built by Daedalus, "a dwelling with tortuous detours, so that one wandered there without finding the exit", specifies Apollodore. Some historians and archaeologists link the motif of the labyrinth to the tangle of rooms, stairs and corridors excavated in the excavations of Knossos, the main Minoan palace. The legend of Theseus then comes to be grafted on the destiny of the half-man half-bull beast. Indeed, from the Archaic period, the murder of the Minotaur by the Athenian hero enjoyed great success in craft and artistic production. Many vases depict Theseus grabbing the Minotaur by a horn and preparing to kill him with a stone, a sword or a club. Gold plates and armbands of shields, mainly from Olympia, also popularized from the 7th th century BC. the motif of the struggle between Theseus and the monster. The plague that strikes Athens Diodorus and Apollodorus specify the context of the Minotaur's death. The son of Minos, Androgée, would have been assassinated on the order of Aegeus, king of Athens and father of Theseus. This murder triggers a war with Minos and a drought that overwhelms the Athenians. According to the oracle of Apollo, only the appeasement of the king of Crete can stem the scourge. He then formulates his demands:every nine years, seven young men and seven young girls will be delivered to the Minotaur as food. When the third convoy was sent, Theseus was one of the potential victims. According to the versions, he would have volunteered or would have been appointed by Minos himself. Arrived in Crete with the other hostages, he is seen by the daughter of Minos, Ariane, who falls in love and entrusts him with a ball of thread that she takes from Daedalus, always an actor in the myth thanks to his mètis , his cunning intelligence. Theseus thus manages to kill the monster and come out of the labyrinth safe and sound, with the other young people. It is the hero Theseus, son of the king of Athens, who puts an end to the curse that weighed on his city by killing the Minotaur in the labyrinth. From an anthropological point of view, the murder of the Minotaur allows Theseus to join the line of civilizing heroes, who purge the lands of brigands and monsters, like Heracles. Besides, the Minotaur is only one adversary on a long list:before arriving in Athens, Theseus pacified on his way the region located between his birthplace, Troezene, and the city of his father, Aegean. He thus kills Procrustes, Sinis, Scyron and Cercyon. All these individuals previously attacked travelers, until the passage of the hero. The death of the Minotaur also allows the young Theseus to obtain royalty and thus constitutes an initiatory rite allowing access to maturity. Indeed, Theseus is supposed to put white sails on his ship, when he returns to Athens, if he returns safe and sound. But, forgetting his promise, he presents himself with black veils. His father, Aegeus, seeing this disastrous color in the distance and believing his son to be dead, commits suicide in grief and leaves the throne to the young man. Sacred porridge In the Athenian religion, Theseus is thus the protective hero of youth, whom he accompanies in the transition to adulthood. Two Athenian festivals linked to the adolescent age group celebrate the memory of his Cretan adventures:the Pyanepsies and the Oschophories. During the Pyanepsies, boys and girls eat porridge. This meal is an alimentary replica of the mythological porridge prepared by teenagers with the remains of food taken on the journey from Athens. Just saved from the Minotaur by Theseus, they feed on this puree. During the festival of Oschophoria, which takes place on the same day as the Pyanepsia, a procession is led by two boys dressed as girls. This disguise refers again to the Cretan episode:Theseus would have replaced two of the young girl hostages with boys. Thus, the Cretan saga makes Theseus a hero of the initiation of young people. In addition to this formative role, Theseus acquired a special status in the classical period, where he was also associated with the Athenian maritime power, the “thalassocracy”. He is now presented as a son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and his passage through Crete takes on a new meaning. By killing the Minotaur, Theseus also defeats Minos. However, for the Athenians, Minos and his kingdom embodied the first thalassocracy in history, which was now replaced by Athenian maritime power. A legend questioned If the episode of the Minotaur is highlighted by Athenian culture and propaganda, its very existence is not unanimous in ancient documentation. Some minority and little-known voices have risen against this teratological myth, evoking the story of a human monster. At IV th century BC. J.-C., an author named Palaiphatos writes a collection of Incredible Stories in which he revisits various Greek myths through the prism of a rational reading. He thus poses as a precursor of the euhemerism that develops in the following century, according to which the characters of the myths really existed. Palaiphatos is thus surprised by the legend of the Minotaur. He learnedly reminds us that matings between different species do not exist and that a woman cannot carry a fetus with horns. The explanation is quite different. King Minos suffered from testicles and had to wait for the intervention of Procris, the daughter of King Pandion, to be cured. Minos had a friend named Tauros, a very handsome young man whom Pasiphae fell in love with while her husband was ill. From his adulterous affair was born a child, Minotaur, whom Minos sent to the mountains to be raised by shepherds. Minotaur eventually grew violent and out of control, and buried himself in a deep pit he had dug himself in order to evade capture. Minos sent to him all those he wanted to punish until Theseus put him to death. “Would you believe it, Ariane? said Theseus, the Minotaur barely defended himself. (The Abode of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borge, 1947) This anthropomorphic version of the Minotaur is not the one that has survived the centuries. The monster has become a recurring motif in art and literature. In 1947, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story, The Abode of Asterion . While Antiquity made the Minotaur a stooge of Theseus, Borges changes his point of view. For the first time, the Minotaur expresses himself and tells of the loneliness of his labyrinth. “Every nine years, nine human beings enter the house for me to deliver them from all suffering. […] They fall one after the other, without even my hands being stained with blood. […] One of them, when dying, announced that one day my Redeemer would come. […] Provided that he leads me to a place where there will be fewer galleries and fewer doors. How will my redeemer be? I wonder. Will it be a bull or a man? Will it be a bull with the head of a man? Or will he be like me? The morning sun shone on the bronze sword, where there was already no trace of blood. “Will you believe it, Ariane? said Theseus, the Minotaur barely defended himself. » Find out more Theseus and the Athenian Imagination, by Claude Calame, La Découverte, 2018.The Aleph and other tales, by Jorge Luis Borges, Bilingual Folio, 2017. The Cretans, experts in "leaping the bull" The excavations carried out by Arthur Evans in Crete from 1900 made it possible to exhume many treasures from the palace of Knossos:jewels, containers and frescoes, which constitute precious sources of information on the Minoan civilization. Like other peoples, the Cretans attributed a specific virtue to the bull. These elements merge in the "taurokathapsie", a ritual aerobatic exercise, the culmination of which was to perform a very risky jump on the back of the bull, as illustrated by a fresco which adorned the throne room of the palace. of Knossos. Theseus abandons her who saved him Like Medea, Princess Ariadne betrays her people and her own family out of love for a foreign hero. The origin of her character is mysterious:perhaps she is a goddess of vegetation, or the "Lady of the labyrinth" mentioned on a tablet written in Linear B, found at Knossos. But it is his human destiny that fascinates. Ariadne, who helped Theseus out of the labyrinth, is abandoned by the young ingrate in Naxos, during the return trip to Athens. Interpretations diverge from there:she finds death on the island or is saved by the god Dionysus. Monster Survival The theme of the labyrinth became Christianized in the Middle Ages. It is found on the paving of cathedrals, as in Chartres or Amiens:it becomes a symbolic way of life, which the pilgrim must follow to the center while praying. The figure of the Minotaur is also transmitted in medieval times, thanks to the work of scholars on classical authors. Incarnation of Evil, the monster sometimes takes on an inverted appearance:the body of a bull surmounted by the bust of a man. The Renaissance puts the myth of Theseus back in the spotlight.
