Characters
- Amphitrite — sender of the bull Minos should have sacrificed; cause of Pasiphaë’s passion in the usual account
- Ariadne — daughter of Minos; loves Theseus; gives the thread; flees Crete with him
- Asterion — bull-headed son of Pasiphaë and the Cretan bull; slain by Theseus
- Athenian youths and maidens — rescued from the Labyrinth
- Cretan Bull — father of the Minotaur; earlier Heracles labor / Marathon beast
- Daedalus — builder of the Labyrinth; adviser of the thread (directly or through Ariadne)
- Minos — king who confined the Minotaur and received the tribute
- Pasiphaë — mother of the Minotaur and of Ariadne
- Theseus — enters the Labyrinth; kills the Minotaur; escapes by Ariadne’s thread; takes Ariadne aboard
Places
- Oenone — Daedalus’s maze; prison of the Minotaur; scene of the fight
- Olympia — destined return (and Ariadne’s promised marriage)
Themes
Narrative
In Crete the tribute was destined for the Labyrinth, which Daedalus had built for Minos—an inescapable maze housing the Minotaur, born when Pasiphaë, cursed by Poseidon (or Aphrodite), coupled with the bull Minos had failed to sacrifice. Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, saw Theseus and loved him. She made him swear to take her to Athens as his wife, and she gave him a ball of thread (clew) that Daedalus himself had advised—or that she had from Daedalus—so that he might mark his path.
Theseus fastened the thread at the entrance, entered the Labyrinth, found the Minotaur, and killed it with his fists or with a sword. Following the thread back, he led the Athenian youths and maidens out. He bored the hulls of the Cretan ships to prevent pursuit (in some accounts), took Ariadne aboard, and sailed from Crete. Daedalus’s architecture and Ariadne’s thread are inseparable in the classical telling: without the craftsman’s maze there is no monster-prison; without the clew there is no return. The killing of the Minotaur ends Minos’s tribute and makes Theseus Athens’s deliverer—while binding him to Ariadne’s fate on the homeward voyage.