Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Eurystheus sent Heracles to Crete for the bull that Minos’s arrogance had loosed upon the island. Poseidon had raised a magnificent bull from the sea when Minos prayed for a sign that he should rule; Minos was to sacrifice it, but substituted another and kept the god’s bull for his herds. In anger Poseidon made the beast wild and— in the fuller Cretan cycle—kindled Pasiphaë’s unnatural desire for it. For this labor Heracles needed only the rampaging animal itself. He asked Minos for aid; Minos told him to take the bull if he could master it alone. Heracles caught it, brought it living across to Eurystheus, and, when the king wanted nothing further to do with it, released it. The bull wandered to Sparta and Arcadia, crossed the Isthmus, and came to rest in Attica at Marathon, where it would later be known as the Marathonian bull—prey, in other cycles, for Theseus. Thus the seventh labor is another live capture and transfer: Crete’s divine punishment becomes Eurystheus’s showpiece and then Attica’s wandering menace. The Pasiphaë–Minotaur sequel belongs to Minos’s house, not to Heracles’s deed beyond the shared bull.