Facts of the Day (7/6/26)

1. Sir Arthur Evans named the Crete-centered Minoan civilization for Minos, a king of Crete in Greek mythology most associated with the Minotaur (offspring of his wife Pasiphaë and the Cretan Bull) and his demand that Athens send noble youths to be sacrificed to the Minotaur as revenge for the killing of his son Androgeus.

Ruins of the Minoan civilization at Knossos

2. Minos appears in a few non-Minotaur-related myths.  After his son Glaucus fell into a vat of honey and drowned, Minos commissioned Polyidus to find the body and then to discover how to bring the boy back to life.  (The difficult was nothing; the impossible took Polyidus a week.)

When Minos invaded Megara, Scylla (not that one), the daughter of its ruler Nisus, fell in love with him from afar and decided to pull a Delilah: She cut off the purple lock of hair that was the secret of Nisus' invulnerability.  Minos took the city but was repulsed by Scylla's act of betrayal and abandoned her.  Both she and her dad were transformed into birds and the latter now pursues the former throughout eternity.

Women were also key to Minos' demise.  Following Daedalus' escape from the labyrinth (poor Icarus!), the ingenious inventor was sheltered in Sicily by a local leader named Cocalus.  Minos used an engineering riddle to trick Daedalus out of hiding, but before Minos could collect the fugitive, Cocalus' daughters enticed Minos to take a bath and then killed him with scalding water.

3. Minos is one of three offspring of Zeus to be a judge in the underworld; the others are his brother Rhadamanthus (a fellow child of Europa) and Aeacus.  (Due to conflicting portrayals of Minos in the mythos, later rationalizers argued that the revered adjudicator was "Minos I" and the vengeful "Minos II" was his grandson.)

Aeacus, fathered by Zeus with the nymph Aegina and monarch of the island Aegina, had three notable sons of his own: Peleus, father of Achilles; Telamon, father of Ajax the Greater; and Phocus, his favorite.  The former duo murdered the latter out of jealousy and were summarily exiled.