The story, as the Greeks told it
The fullest ancient version is in the Library, a handbook of myths attributed to Apollodorus. Minos, king of Crete, asked Poseidon for a bull and then refused to sacrifice it. The angry god made the king’s wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the animal, and the craftsman Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow covered with a real hide. She gave birth to a son named Asterius, “who was called the Minotaur”: he had the face of a bull and the body of a man. Minos shut him in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built, a place whose tangled windings, in the text’s words, “perplexed the outward way”.
Plutarch, in his life of Theseus, adds the price paid by Athens. Every nine years the city had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete, and according to the most dramatic version they were killed by the Minotaur or wandered in the Labyrinth until they died. Theseus went with them. Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him, gave him “the famous thread”, as Plutarch calls it, and showed him the way through; he killed the monster and sailed away with her, the episode told in Theseus and Ariadne.
A word older than the myth
Is the Labyrinth only a Greek invention? Not quite. When the Mycenaeans ran Knossos, in the fourteenth century BCE, their scribes kept accounts on clay tablets in Linear B, an early form of Greek. One of them, catalogued as KN Gg 702, records a jar of honey for da-pu₂-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the “Mistress of the Labyrinth”, as the Linear B scholar Gareth Owens translates it. The linguist Anna Judson, in a 2017 study, reads da-pu₂-ri-to as the same word as the Greek labyrinthos.
So a “Labyrinth” existed at Knossos centuries before the Greek poets, with a “Mistress” who received offerings. What it was, a building, a shrine or the palace itself, the tablet does not say.
Why Knossos?
No excavation has found a maze, underground or otherwise. What the excavators did find at Knossos was the largest of the palaces of Crete: wings on several floors around a central court, with storerooms, shrines and rooms opening into rooms. UNESCO, which listed the Minoan palaces in 2025, links the legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth directly to these buildings, as a memory of their complexity and size. Add the bull, everywhere in Minoan art, from libation vessels shaped like bulls’ heads to the acrobats who leap over charging bulls, and a king of Crete who, according to the historian Thucydides, was the first to rule the sea. The myth had plenty to work with.
Theseus on Athenian vases
Athens made Theseus its hero, and its potters painted his fight again and again. On a black-figure neck-amphora made around 510-500 BCE and found at Vulci, in central Italy, Theseus, beardless and wearing a lion skin, plunges his sword into the chest of the Minotaur, who kneels while the hero holds him by a horn. The jar, 38.5 cm high, is in the British Museum.
Some seventy years later, a red-figure drinking cup attributed to the Codrus Painter (about 440-430 BCE) sets the fight among six more of Theseus’s deeds, painted in a ring around the central medallion. In the medallion he drags the dying Minotaur by the horn out of a building, shown as a Doric column with its entablature next to a strip of maze-like pattern: the painter needed only a porch to say “Labyrinth”.
From Pompeii to Picasso
The Romans played with the story. In the house of Marcus Lucretius at Pompeii, someone scratched a labyrinth on a wall with the words “Labyrinthus. Hic habitat Minotaurus” (“Labyrinth. Here lives the Minotaur”); the graffito is known today only from nineteenth-century drawings, and it was perhaps a joke at the expense of the owner. Centuries later the maze turned up on a church. Under the portico of Lucca Cathedral, beside one of the side doors, a labyrinth more than a metre across is carved on a pier, with a Latin inscription: this is the labyrinth that Daedalus of Crete built, from which nobody who entered could get out, except Theseus, thanks to Ariadne’s thread.
Modern artists kept the monster and changed its meaning. The sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye modelled Theseus Slaying the Minotaur in 1843 and a second version around 1857; a cast is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1935 Pablo Picasso etched the Minotauromachy, where the Minotaur meets, among other figures, two girls with doves at a window and a bearded man on a ladder. The Museum of Modern Art reads it as a private mythology from a troubled time in his life, and as a visual source for Guernica, painted in 1937.
Where to see it
The Codrus Painter’s cup is on display in the British Museum (Room 19 at the time of writing); the black-figure amphora is in the museum’s stores. The labyrinth of Lucca is carved under the cathedral portico, outside the building. Barye’s bronze is in the Met in New York, and an impression of Picasso’s etching is at MoMA. And Knossos, of course, is the place to judge for yourself whether a palace can feel like a maze. Check opening times and displays with each museum.
Sources
- Apollodorus, Library 3.1.4; Plutarch, Life of Theseus 15 and 19; Thucydides 1.4 (Perseus Digital Library).
- G. Owens, “The Labyrinth”, Daidalika, Hellenic Mediterranean University (KN Gg 702).
- A. P. Judson, “The Mystery of the Mycenaean ‘Labyrinth’: The Value of Linear B pu₂ and Related Signs”, SMEA NS 3 (2017), 53-72.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Minoan Palatial Centres” (1733), criterion (vi).
- British Museum, collection records 1843,1103.21 and 1850,0302.3.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 14.58.131; The Museum of Modern Art, Minotauromachy (20.1947).
- Finestre sull’Arte, “The House of the Labyrinth in Pompeii” (2023) and “The labyrinth of Lucca Cathedral” (2024).
