The Minotaur

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Speaker 1 It is one of the most famous and scariest monsters of Greek mythology. A creature half man and half bull trapped in a great labyrinth beneath Kenossos on the island of Crete.

Speaker 1 Its story is a familiar one. A bloodthirsty beast that feasted on human flesh until it was slain by the hero Theseus with the help of the princess Ariadne.

Speaker 1 But what exactly was the Minotaur?

Speaker 1 How popular was its story in ancient times, and how has it endured and evolved over the centuries down to the present day, in formats varying from 19th-century oil paintings to brand new TV series retelling the Greek myths.

Speaker 1 It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're delving deep into the Minotaur's story.
This creature's mythological life and legacy down to the present day.

Speaker 1 Our guest for this episode is the wonderful best-selling author Caroline Lawrence.

Speaker 1 Caroline has written many brilliant children's books over the years, thrilling adventure stories set in the Greek and Roman worlds.

Speaker 1 Most recently, She has written a new book all about the gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters of Greek mythology, including the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 It was such a pleasure to record this interview with Caroline, and I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 1 Caroline, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 11 Tristan, it is wonderful to be here.

Speaker 1 And what a topic. I mean, in the past on the ancients, we've done quite a bit of Greek mythology.
We've done the gods and goddesses.

Speaker 1 We've done heroes like Heracles and Jason and the Argonauts, but Caroline, we've rarely done monsters and we've never done the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 And And it feels like monsters, they are such a big part of Greek mythology.

Speaker 11 Absolutely. Yeah, they're a wonderful part of Greek mythology.

Speaker 11 I think one of the things that we love about Greek myths are the amazing images that you don't get in any other culture or storytelling or scenario.

Speaker 11 And I just, you know, when I think of Greek myths, I think of things like, a giant wooden horse standing in the middle of a flaming city.

Speaker 11 who thought that up that's amazing or something like i asked my husband i just asked him i said when you when i say greek mythology what images come to mind he said the judgment of paris you know the shepherd standing in front of three goddesses often nude judging them during a beauty contest things like just the birth of aphrodite things like that and

Speaker 11 I was just, when I think about it, I have to say, I think about it a lot from Greek vases and the primary sources. But for me, when I was growing up, the Greek myths were Ray Harryhausen films.

Speaker 11 And some of those films, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts about Jason, Clash of the Titans about Perseus, have some of the most stunning imagery that will never leave my head.

Speaker 11 So the Greek myths, just amazing, amazing.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting, you know, those monster depictions, as you say, that's kind of the imagination that they have.

Speaker 1 I mean, I I think maybe like the chimera or something like that especially when they they mix different animals together to create these fascinating I mean hybrid scary monsters and of course the Minotaur is just one of them but Caroline I'm guessing in your latest book you must have had to cover so many of those different monsters and the different myths that they're associated with and the complex stories of those various creatures too Well, my latest book is called Pantheon, and it's actually about the 12 Olympians, or actually there were 14, but so I do that the 14 major gods, but I thought I couldn't leave out the minor gods.

Speaker 11 And then I thought, well, I've got to include the heroes. And I'm afraid the monsters come right at the end.
And I don't do them all, but I do do quite a few.

Speaker 11 And in a way, the whole book is kind of just a little introduction. And I often say that.

Speaker 11 I kind of boil down these complex mythological characters to their essence, to the kind of stock cubes of who and what they were. So I just give a little paragraph on each.
So it's perfect for the

Speaker 11 attention span of today's reader, you know, just a little box about each one.

Speaker 11 And I think one of the things about monsters, I was thinking about why do we like monsters? What do monsters in myths do? And

Speaker 11 I think it's a combination of observation and imagination.

Speaker 11 And the first thing that struck me is my real passion is putting myself back into the ancient world and imagining what it would have been like to live back then.

Speaker 11 And one of the first things is deformity in animals or in people, which is a kind of horrible thing, isn't it?

Speaker 11 I'll never forget once in San Francisco, when I was quite young, a teenager, I saw a two-headed snake and it was alive. It was moving around and it was just

Speaker 11 repulsive. It was so

Speaker 11 deeply horrible that I'll never forget that. And I think, you know, we have stories of two-headed calves or animals with more than one limb.
And I think they must have observed these things.

Speaker 11 And I think that's one of the things that they might have thought, this is a monster. Another one is hybrids, where you match like a donkey and a horse and you get a mule.
So you can combine animals.

Speaker 11 And then we'll skip over this one very quickly, but bestiality, you know, what if a shepherd's in his field and he needs to relieve himself in a certain way and he goes over to a nice cow or a nice sheep or something.

Speaker 11 What if he wonders what would come if that sheep gave birth? What would come out? Kind of creepy one, but it might have been something they thought about.

Speaker 11 And then you get these images coming from other cultures, from the Near East or Egypt, of kind of half human, half animal creatures. And they might have thought, what is this?

Speaker 11 And they might want to explain it. And then one of the things we often forget about is that these monsters had a job, which was to keep away evil.
They often frightened away evil spirits and demons.

Speaker 11 The word is apotropaic

Speaker 11 in Greek, which means turns away evil. And we often forget that they lived in a world full of invisible, not just gods, but demons and little spirits and things.

Speaker 11 But I think of all those things, the most powerful thing is the psychological aspect of the monsters. And if you think about it,

Speaker 11 we humans, we are part animal and we're part divine. I mean, we're part super animals, you know, we think, we tell stories, we dress, we have different cultic practices.

Speaker 11 And it's that tension that causes us so much anguish in life, too. We're always struggling with our animal desires.
And I think that's why monsters can be so deeply powerful and scary and frightening.

Speaker 11 And I think also there's this current fashion of rehabilitating monsters, you know, making them sympathetic, which I'm all for. You know, Natalie Haynes does it in Stone Blind about Medusa.

Speaker 11 And then I think, I'm not sure if you'd call Cersei a monster, but Madeline Miller rehabilitates her and tells her side. But monsters, and of course, Charlie Cavell does it in the new Netflix series.

Speaker 11 He makes the Minotaur, gives him a sympathetic story, but monsters are scary. They're terrifying.
And that's what their power is.

Speaker 1 And I think none more... Maybe not none more scary, but none which is the pool today as the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 I mean, that feels like the name, that's like the main monster that many of us will think of if someone talks about Greek mythology. But Caroline, what was the Minotaur?

Speaker 11 Well, what was the Minotaur? Well, he was half bull, half man.

Speaker 11 And he has a really interesting origin. Before I talk about his origin, though, in my book, I have a little box.
I have some little info boxes.

Speaker 11 And as I was researching all this, I read a book about the importance of cattle in ancient times. And I call this box the cattle connection.

Speaker 11 And, you know, ancient Greeks, in fact, even Stone Age and Bronze Age cultures, cattle, sheep, goats, cows were incredibly important.

Speaker 11 Because if you owned a cow, cattle, even a single cow, you were rich. And what do you use cows for? Well, they provide food, they provide transportation, they can plow your land so you have crops.

Speaker 11 Then when they die, you've got leather for clothing and shoes and textiles and tents.

Speaker 11 And another thing that struck me is

Speaker 11 most people in the Bronze Age or the Stone Age wouldn't have seen, you know, a lion or a bear, but a bull would have been probably the most terrifying and powerful animal they would come into close contact with.

Speaker 11 And if you can just imagine, I don't know if you've ever been near a bull, but they can be terrifying.

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in the countryside and many, many fields.
And, you know, it's not just beware of the dog signs that you see here and there everywhere.

Speaker 1 You also get a lot of beware of the bull or warning bull in field. As you say, a fully grown bull is a very scary animal, even today.
They can be very dangerous.

Speaker 11 They're powerful. And they have the majestic aspect, too, because the horns, horns are a deep symbol of power.

Speaker 11 And so they are often associated with kings and things. And in fact, once you start looking for cattle in the Greek myths, you see them everywhere.

Speaker 11 For example, the first thing baby Hermes does as soon as he's born is to, well, after he kills the tortoise and makes it into a lyre, is he steals the cattle of Apollo.

Speaker 1 Yes, he's one day old, isn't he?

Speaker 11 That's great. He's one day old.
Oh, it's so cute. I love that story.
And it makes, but then you just think of Apollo, this golden god who plays, well, he's going to play the lyre.

Speaker 11 He's like a cowherd and baby Hermes is a little cattle rustler. And then you've got Hera, the queen of the gods, who's often called ox-eyed or cow-eyed.
Apparently, it's a compliment.

Speaker 11 And then Zeus, Poseidon, and Dionysus are all deeply associated with bulls. Two of the labors of Hercules have to do with bulls.
Odysseus gets into trouble when his men steal the sacred cattle.

Speaker 11 And then Cadmus from Phoenicia, he follows a cow who leads him to Boeotia, which means cowland in Greek.

Speaker 11 And there he founds Thebes, which is going to be the great tragic city of Pentheus, Oedipus, Antigone, etc.

Speaker 11 And we're going to come to cows in a minute when I do the origin story of

Speaker 11 the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 But I think it's Katyla. I've completely forgot that.
Boeotia, of course, course, Boas, you know, that means cow land, cow part of Greece, which is so interesting.

Speaker 1 And I guess if we kind of keep on that context a bit more, I mean, Caroline, that main theater, geographic area we're going to be talking about with the Minotaur myth is, of course, the island of Crete.

Speaker 1 And that has also got a very strong connection with cows and bulls in particular, doesn't it?

Speaker 11 Yes, absolutely. And I think, again, that that connection with cows and bulls.

Speaker 11 It's not just Crete. It's not just mainland Greece.
You get it in Phoenicia. You get it in Egypt.
You get it. We see images of Baal, the Canaanite god, with a bull head and a man's body.

Speaker 11 So they're, again, the cow is so deeply important to all these cultures, and they have different ways of kind of expressing that.

Speaker 1 Now, before we go on to that origin story, what sources do we have for this myth? I mean, in which ancient sources is the myth of the Minotaur retold?

Speaker 11 A good question. We have a first mention of him is in a poet called Callimachus, who's of the third century BC.

Speaker 11 And he just has a little line. He talks about Theseus escaping from the cruel bellowing of the wild son of Pacify and the twisted dwelling place of the crooked labyrinth.

Speaker 11 So right there, although it doesn't call him Minotaur in that third century BC bit of poetry, you've got all the elements. You've got Theseus, you've got the mother, and you've got the maze.

Speaker 11 Then we first see it written down on vases, and there's a famous skiphos, which is a kind of deep bowl with two little horizontal handles at the top called the Reyet Skiphos.

Speaker 11 And that's from appropriately enough, Boeotia, cowland.

Speaker 11 And it shows Theseus stepping forward to stab the Minotaur. And in that one, the Minotaur looks a bit like his head.
It looks almost like a unicorn. It could be a horse with one horn.

Speaker 11 But then in a vase of about 400, we call it, someone's written minoiotauros, which means the bull of minos. So that's the kind of first time it's written down.

Speaker 11 But obviously there's this deep association starting from about the sixth century BC in Greece with of this bullheaded person

Speaker 11 in a maze.

Speaker 1 But that's interesting.

Speaker 1 So as you've highlighted there, when we're talking about source material for this myth, Caroline, we shouldn't just be thinking of written down references, as you've highlighted there.

Speaker 1 I mean, vase painting, I'm guessing and sculpture as well we have these various archaeological pieces of evidence too to kind of piece together more about the Minotaur especially in ancient times and how popular or how this myth was perceived by those living back then absolutely and I forgot to say the two main sources or I'd say one is Apollodorus or a pseudo-Apollodorus as he's sometimes called who is writing in Greek in the first century CE.

Speaker 11 And also Ovid writes about the Minotaur, not just in the Metamorphoses, but in the Ars Amatoria.

Speaker 1 And he's a Roman writer, isn't he? Yes.

Speaker 11 He's a Roman writing, yeah, in Latin, right like before the birth of Christ, just before the birth of Christ. And he has a wonderful phrase.

Speaker 11 He describes the Minotaur as semi-bovem que virum, semi-virum que bovem, which means a half-bull man and a half-man bull. So it's a kind of Latin tongue twister, a hybrid line for a hybrid creature.

Speaker 11 So that's good fun. And he talks about the unholy womb and stuff like that that gave birth to the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 But is it always the depiction of the Minotaur with the body of a man and the head of a bull? It's never the body of a bull and the head of a man, is it?

Speaker 11 Myths are malleable. So we do sometimes get

Speaker 11 the body of a bull and the head of the man, which is deeply creepy. For some reason, that's more creepy than the body of a man with the head of a bull.

Speaker 11 So we do occasionally get it because, of course, these myths are not canon, they're not scripture, they're malleable. You can play with them.

Speaker 11 And in fact, I think some of our most striking images of the Minotaur and the maze come from the Greek tragedians of the fifth century, who maybe we don't still have their plays, but we have little lines from them, which are very, very powerful.

Speaker 11 So yeah, they think Sophocles might have been the one who talks about the maze as a twisty thing. And I think there's a wonderful line in Euripides about

Speaker 11 a baby born of mixed and sterile form, a mixture of man and bull, of dual nature. So again, you've got this kind of hybrid creature.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you mentioned two of those great tragic playwrights there as well, Caroline and Sophocles and Euripides. So good to highlight them as well.
But let's move on, as you've hinted at already.

Speaker 1 Let's move on to the origin story. Caroline, what is the origin story of the Minotaur?

Speaker 11 The origin story starts with Europa. Well, I mean, you can go back almost to as far as you want.
It starts with Europa. Now, she was a Phoenician princess from Tyre, which is modern Lebanon.

Speaker 11 So that's really interesting. She's like a Semitic person.
And her ancestor, not her mother, but a few generations back, might have been Io. And Io was a nymph that Zeus loved.

Speaker 11 Zeus is going to factor, as we know, big in all the myths because he's always desiring nymphs, girls, women, goddesses, whatever. And he, sure enough, he spotted Io and desired her.

Speaker 11 And he went to seduce her or whatever.

Speaker 11 And then he heard Hera coming. So he quickly turned Io into a heifer

Speaker 11 so that Hera wouldn't be suspicious. But Hera was not fooled and she sent a godfly to torment this poor heifer, Io, who was running all over the place.

Speaker 11 So already in Europa's ancestry, we've got a great-great-grandmother who was turned into a cow. Then Europa was, as I said, she's a Phoenician princess playing on the seashore one day.

Speaker 11 Zeus spots her and likes her. So he takes the form of a beautiful bull and goes along the beach.
And she comes up to him because he's so beautiful. And he lets her stroke him.

Speaker 11 And all the girls she's with are like amazed that she's so bold. And then she actually climbs on his back.
and off he goes over the sea and ends up in Crete.

Speaker 11 So he takes Europa to Crete, and that's where we get the term Europe, though Crete, would we call Crete Europe? I don't know.

Speaker 11 So anyway, they have

Speaker 11 three sons. Zeus and Europa have three sons, Minos, Radamanthus, and Sarpedon.
And as sons do, they all vie with each other for the kingship.

Speaker 11 And essentially, Minos sends the other two off to somewhere else where they found other places. But Minos still has to legitimize his claim to the throne of Crete for the kingship.

Speaker 11 So he says to everybody, look, I'm going to call on Poseidon, or in some cases, Zeus, but mainly Poseidon, most of the myths, to show you that I am the chosen one.

Speaker 11 Poseidon, send me a bull from the sea. Sure enough, Poseidon sends him a bull from the sea, and we've still got the cow motif going on here.
It was so beautiful.

Speaker 11 And Minos said, I will sacrifice this bull to you, of course, Poseidon. The bull is so beautiful that he cannot bear to sacrifice it.

Speaker 11 So he puts it into his herd and gets an inferior substitute and sacrifices that. Uh-oh, indeed.
Not a good idea.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Not a good idea. And, you know, these monsters often come as a result of some crime against the gods or hubris or something.
So Poseidon is not happy.

Speaker 11 And as he is furious, and as punishment, he arranges for Pacifi, the wife of Minos, to fall in love with that bull.

Speaker 11 So Pisiphy is trying to think about how she can get it on with that bull.

Speaker 11 And she asks an exile from Athens named Daedalus, the very clever inventor, if he can come up with an idea.

Speaker 11 And he comes up, he makes a hollow frame of a cow, covers it with cowhide, and she can hide inside so that she can mate. with the bull.
So that's one of his inventions.

Speaker 11 And nine months later, a little baby is born and that baby has the body of a child according to most depictions and accounts and the head of a bull

Speaker 1 i mean caroline you as you mentioned earlier and so we won't hang on this topic very long but you did mention earlier kind of that bestiality side of some of these myths and this is like a prime example of it isn't it with the whole origin story of the minotaur and it's interesting how that is used to explain the creation of hybrid monsters when those monsters are to do partly with with human beings.

Speaker 11 Exactly. And now this baby is born and we have a wonderful vase that's in

Speaker 11 Paris at the moment and it shows Paisophy with a little toddler minos on her lap and he's got little horns and he, I think they suckled kids till they were quite old, like four or five and even older sometimes in that period.

Speaker 11 And at first you think, oh, she loves her little baby, her little Minotaur. But if you look closely, her mouth is turned down and she's not quite touching him.

Speaker 11 And so I wonder if there's something of a revulsion. What is, she thinks, what have I done? And her husband, Minos, of course, he's married to this woman and she gives birth to this monster.

Speaker 11 He's horrified and he consults an oracle and he doesn't just kill it because it's obviously, you know, there's something special about this creature. He doesn't just kill it.

Speaker 11 He consults an oracle and the oracle says to hide him away and create, put him in a labyrinth. So he gets Daedalus, again, the inventor.

Speaker 11 and the labyrinth is designed by Daedalus to keep the bull hidden, this monster Minotaur hidden away from human sight. And because it's an aberration, it's not natural.

Speaker 11 It can't eat hay or straw or grass like a bull. So it must be fed human flesh.
So

Speaker 11 of course, according to the myth, the Athenians, for various reasons, have to send nine boys and girls every seven years or seven boys and girls every nine years, something like that, as tribute to this miner.

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Speaker 1 I mean, Karen, before we keep going with the myth, shall we shall we kind of focus a bit more on those parts you just talked about?

Speaker 1 And the first part, but it's all really interesting that there's a depiction of a baby Minotaur in on an ancient greek vase which is you know a part of the story that you don't immediately think of but should we focus a bit on on daedalus on this character of daedalus because he seems to be he's an extraordinary figure in mythology he's associated as you say with creating that bull that fate bull for you know for pacify to mate with the bull and then the creation of the labyrinth but he has several stories from mythology and and there is another big one that i'm thinking of too absolutely and i'm afraid I couldn't fit everybody into my book.

Speaker 11 And he does not make it into my book, really. But of course, he was apparently he committed some crime in Athens and they exiled him and he fled to Crete.
And he was incredibly clever.

Speaker 11 And the first thing he created was this cow for Pacifi. Then he created the labyrinth, but they kept him prisoner so that he wouldn't tell.
Minos didn't want him to get out and say what he created.

Speaker 11 So they kept him and his son Icarus prisoner.

Speaker 11 And we all know the story that he devised a clever way to escape by making wings of light wood or reed with wax and feathers and designed these beautiful wings.

Speaker 11 Again, an extraordinary idea that even back then they had a craving, an idea of how you can fly, and they had certain gods who could fly. And of course, Hermes, the messenger god, could fly.

Speaker 11 But anyway, Icarus makes the wings, and we all know the story of how he warns his son not to go too high because he thinks the sun might melt the wax.

Speaker 11 Sure enough, Icarus goes high, the wax melts, and he plunges into the sea, which is called the Icarian Sea from then on after him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Well, I feel we need to talk about Daedalus and Icarus very quickly, because

Speaker 1 he is a main figure in the story of the Minotaur as the creator of the labyrinth. And as you say, the aftermath is that he is imprisoned.

Speaker 1 in Kenossos at Minos' capital, which will lead to that Icarus myth too. I mean, do we know anything about the supposed layout of the labyrinth, the shape, or is that detail not really given, Caroline?

Speaker 11 Oh, no, we know we know that. I mean, what's fascinating is that the Greeks have the word labyrinth and they know what it means.

Speaker 11 I mean, Plato in one of his dialogues talks about less, he says something about, has Socrates say, at this point, we were involved in a labyrinthine discussion, you know, so they know what it means.

Speaker 11 And they saw coins from Crete, which have a maze on them on one side going way back of course the cretan civilization had gone by about i believe about 1400 bc it was a bronze age civilization the mycenaeans invaded then crete was gone there was eruption of thera or whatever and so this was a dim memory to the greeks but they kept seeing these coins with a maze on it and these were coins of Knassos.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 in about the late 1800s, a couple of archaeologists decided to start digging where they found these coins.

Speaker 11 And they found famously, in fact, Arthur Evans, rich Englishman, he bought part of Crete, this area in Crete, and started digging and found the ruins of this enormous palace complex, which looks like a labyrinth when you see it laid out.

Speaker 11 And it had no walls. It didn't need town walls because Crete is an island.
And it was almost like a city palace. It had shops and workshops and housing and

Speaker 11 frescoes on the wall and columns and courtyards.

Speaker 11 And so in a way, it looks like a labyrinth, even today.

Speaker 11 And Arthur Evans saw this double-headed axe, which is called a labris, written on, scrawled on some of the walls.

Speaker 11 And so he thought the word labras and labyrinth might have been linked, though scholars aren't sure about that. So he named this palace at Knossos the house of the axe.

Speaker 11 But I think that's probably where the idea of the labyrinth comes from, is this massive palace with labyrinthine rooms and the corridors.

Speaker 1 I mean, Caroline, it is fascinating to explore things like that.

Speaker 1 And as we talked about earlier, like the association with bulls, strong association with bulls in ancient Greece and further beyond, because then, as I'm sure you've seen when you're writing your book and exploring many of these myths to do with the Greek gods and goddesses, how you can sometimes find historical context as to why certain myths are created.

Speaker 1 And it's fascinating that association with Kenossos and Crete with the labyrinth. And I said, potentially, it's that kind of labyrinthine design of the palace.

Speaker 11 It's amazing because if you think about Schliemann, he believed that there was a Trojan war. So he went looking where he thought it would have taken place, where Troy Troy might have been.

Speaker 1 Heinrich Schliemann, he's a German excavator.

Speaker 11 Heinrich Schliemann, exactly. And he found Troy.

Speaker 11 And in the same way, Arthur Evans, Sir Arthur Evans, around 1900, let's say, he went and started digging where they found all these coins. And he found Knossos.

Speaker 11 So there is some historical material basis for many of these myths.

Speaker 1 Absolutely brilliant. And now let's keep going with the Minotaur story, Caroline, and kind of pick up from where we left off.
So the Minotaur, I mean, what kinds of food can it eat?

Speaker 11 It can only eat human food. Only human food.

Speaker 11 It's an aberration against nature and

Speaker 11 it needs a tribute. And I don't know if that's some kind of a remnant of sacrifice or, I mean, they've actually found human bones and traces of cannibalism in Crete.

Speaker 11 So maybe that's fed into somehow this memory of this civilization that had been gone for a thousand years by the time the Greek poets were writing about it and the Greek tragedians.

Speaker 11 And so Theseus has to go. He decides to go.
And for various reasons, the tributes, I think

Speaker 11 they come from Athens. Some of the tributes come from Athens, these kids who have to be sacrificed every nine years.

Speaker 11 And Theseus decides that before he can become king of Athens, which is his birthright, he's going to dispatch the Minotaur. So he goes with this boatload of tributes.

Speaker 11 And there's the famous story of he, his father Aegeus says, don't go. And he says, I'll go, I'll conquer the Minotaur.
I'll come back.

Speaker 11 I'll change the black sail to white to show you that I've done it. Of course, he forgets.
And conveniently.

Speaker 11 Conveniently, Aegeus jumps into the Aegean Sea.

Speaker 11 Interesting, it's called after him. And Theseus becomes king.
But anyway, back on the ship, they arrive in Crete.

Speaker 11 And there are lots of retellings of this, but the basic Greek myth is that Ariadne, a princess, another daughter of Minos and Pasiphai, falls in love with him.

Speaker 11 And she tells him the secret of killing the Minotaur who's in this dark labyrinth. Imagine we all have dreams, don't we, about getting lost.
Imagine going into a dark underground labyrinth.

Speaker 11 And I don't know if it's worse if it would be pitch black or if there'd be torches with spooky light, light, you know, making shadows loom and stuff. I don't know which would be more terrifying.

Speaker 11 It would be terrifying. And he's got to find his way to the center of this maze, kill the Minotaur, and then get back.

Speaker 11 And Ariadne gives him the famous thread or the twine. And if he can just keep hold of the thread as it unspools, he can use it to find his way back.

Speaker 11 Now, one thing that's fascinating to me about this myth is it's a perfect example of what's called the hero's journey, which is this kind of template of storytelling that we find in almost, well, many of the Greek myths.

Speaker 11 And many Hollywood screenwriters love this hero's journey structure. And they use it for their stories, which don't have to be about heroes and Greek myths.

Speaker 11 I mean, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz follows this template. Star Wars follows this template.
Pixars Up follows this template.

Speaker 11 I could go on and on telling you all the films that follow the template of the heroist journey, where the hero gets a call to adventure.

Speaker 11 They have to leave their ordinary world and go, they have to cross a threshold. This is very important.
Thresholds are super important. A threshold into a new world of adventure.

Speaker 11 So just think of Theseus going into

Speaker 11 the labyrinth. And often before the hero goes, a helper called a mentor.
will give them advice and give them a talisman, an object.

Speaker 11 So in this bit of the story, Ariadne is the mentor, and she gives Theseus a ball of string, which is the talisman, and that's going to help him.

Speaker 11 Now, according to some accounts, he just punches the Minotaur, but we mostly see him with a sword on depictions.

Speaker 11 He goes into the Minotaur and into the labyrinth, and there's often a step in the hero's journey called the visit to death. And this is the visit to death.
It's symbolic of going to the underworld.

Speaker 11 And almost every hero in Greek mythology goes to the underworld in one way way or another. And then the hero must do the task.
They must take the elixir, kill the monster, save the princess, whatever.

Speaker 11 And then they must get back home again. And then they have to cross another threshold to get back home.
So we often see Anvas' Thesis emerging from the labyrinth.

Speaker 11 And it's often shown by a couple of columns and a pediment. And sometimes the Minotaur is there with him.

Speaker 11 Of course, the Minotaur has been left in the center, but it just shows us that that's what he's just been doing is killing the minotaur so it's this wonderful story of the hero's journey in a little encapsulation which has all the elements he could want i mean caroline it's a great pub quiz question in the future to say what does the minotaur myth up

Speaker 1 star wars and dorothy what do they all have in common and as you say it's it's it's the hero's journey and i never thought about it that way as well and as you say It's an interesting story, isn't it?

Speaker 1 How like the end of it, I guess the climax is Theseus slaying the Minotaur, but it isn't, that's not the end.

Speaker 1 It's him then getting back out of that different world, that scary world that you've, you so brilliantly kind of created that horrifying image of going through that very dark place.

Speaker 1 It's then getting back. I mean, the story continues after the slaying of the Minotaur.

Speaker 11 Very important. The getting back is very important.

Speaker 11 And if you look at myths and stories, you have to see how they get back. And it's And when they get back, they've changed.
Their whole journey, what it's done, it's, it's trained them in some way.

Speaker 11 It's It's helped them become who they're meant to be, whether it's a leader or to save the world like Wally when he saves the earth by bringing back the plant, you know, or whatever it is.

Speaker 11 It's a genius, genius template for storytellers everywhere.

Speaker 11 So exciting. I think it's really great.
Of course, when he gets out of the maze, he then takes Ariadne with him because she's betrayed her father and killed killed her half-brother, the Minotaur.

Speaker 11 Theseus wasn't a very nice person. He abandons her later on the artist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's not the sweet ending that otherwise you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 11 No, no, no. And in fact, Theseus is pretty bad as his record for women.
So we won't look too much into that. We'll go back to the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 No, I think you're quite right. He said we're focusing largely on the Minotaur today, but I mean, the story of Theseus is a very complex one.

Speaker 1 So we focus on the Minotaur quite a lot with Theseus, but there is much more.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not all good with Theseus as a character. But yes, let's go back to the Minotaur.
So, the Minotaur has been slain by Theseus.

Speaker 1 Do we ever hear what happens to the Minotaur or like its corpse, or what happens to it after it's been slain? Because it feels like it's just been left in the labyrinth.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and maybe that's what happens when we slay the monsters in our life.

Speaker 11 We just leave them, and there's a kind of little Dick Payne corpse of that thing that was haunting us in our deep, deep subconscious of our labyrinthine brain. So, there are writers out there.

Speaker 11 There's your story. What happened to the Minotaur after he died?

Speaker 11 I think once they die, they die and he's underground. So, you know, he's essentially been buried.

Speaker 1 As time goes on, do we think that the Minotaur was a popular myth in Greek and then Roman times? You've mentioned a couple of the ways that the Minotaur is depicted.

Speaker 1 I would just like to know if, I mean, do we continue to see depictions of the Minotaur as antiquity goes on?

Speaker 1 Let's say as the Romans really become dominant in the Mediterranean, does the Minotaur remain quite a fashionable beast almost?

Speaker 11 Great question. And we know from Ovid that he likes the Minotaur.
And one of, I love looking at the vases and the frescoes.

Speaker 11 And we've got some wonderful frescoes from Pompeii of Theseus and the Minotaur. So yes, he's still very, very popular.
Obviously, monsters go in and out of fashion.

Speaker 11 What really interests me is what we've done with him in the last hundred, 200 hundred years about pop culture. And do you mind if I talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Should we start with the 19th century first of all and paintings for pop culture? Or would you like to go straight into kind of TV and depictions?

Speaker 11 Well, let's talk about one of the most famous paintings of the Minotaur, which is by, is it Watts?

Speaker 1 George Frederick Watts.

Speaker 11 That's him. GM.

Speaker 11 You know what, Caroline?

Speaker 1 I can't take credit for that because I've seen your Instagram post about that very painting very recently. So you are the credit for that.

Speaker 11 So this is really fascinating because there was a bill trying to be put through Parliament about raising the act of consent for children and worrying about child prostitution, which was a real problem in Victorian period.

Speaker 11 And it was so distressing that this Watts, who was one of the most popular artists of his time, he read the article.

Speaker 11 went to sleep, and the next morning he woke up and painted this amazing painting of the Minotaur in one morning.

Speaker 11 Wow. And it shows the Minotaur from the back.
He's slightly turned away from us. He's leaning on a balustrade.
He's not underground. He's looking out at the sea.

Speaker 11 And when you first look at it, he looks quite lonely and sympathetic. One scholar has commented his face looks almost dog-like and he's got long eyelashes.

Speaker 11 But then if you look more closely, it's kind of creepy because first of all, it looks like he's looking at you out of the corner of his eye and then you notice that in his hand he's crushed a bird a little tiny bird he's crushed dead and then you see what he's looking at is a ship bringing the tribute of children for him and this was he became a metaphor for the sort of person who enjoys abusing underage children or children at all for in horrible ways.

Speaker 11 And so it was a real statement about what was happening in society at that moment i was so excited to hear that the tate britain has all watts's paintings so i went to look at it and it's in storage so i tweeted the tape bring it out you know this is our message we've got to hear as well bring back out that what's minor tour painting especially with the current popularity of greek mythology the resurgence people looking at it, retelling it, using the myths to talk about what's happening now, which is what the myths are so useful for, to bring it out.

Speaker 11 What's really interesting is that the famous short story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a short story partly inspired by that painting.

Speaker 11 He was putting out a magazine and he had two pages to fill, so he thought, I'll write a short story, two pages long. And he wrote a story called The House of Asterion.

Speaker 11 And Asterion was the name of the Minotaur in ancient Greek.

Speaker 11 And although it's very short, it's considered a classic because it's arguably the first story about an ancient monster that's told from the monster's point of view, which is super interesting.

Speaker 11 That is.

Speaker 11 And I was thinking, you know, for example, how would we do it right now, today? How would we tell the myth of the Minotaur? And I was just thinking that about the cattle

Speaker 11 connection and that a bull would be equal to a car in modern terms. And I thought, well, what if a woman mated with a car?

Speaker 11 And actually, there was a, in 2021, an ultra-violent French film called Titan, won the Palme d'Or.

Speaker 11 And in that, that's exactly what happens: is this girl's in a car accident and she has a titanium plate in her head?

Speaker 11 And then later on, she falls in love with a vintage Cadillac and becomes pregnant by that.

Speaker 10 So weird.

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Speaker 1 Let's kind of move on to that idea of modern day portrayals of the Minotaur.

Speaker 1 And I know there's a series that we've both watched recently, which of course does feature the Minotaur and a reimagining of the Minotaur story.

Speaker 1 I mean, we can focus on that, but also more generally, Caroline, 21st century.

Speaker 1 said Greek mythology now very popular and also there have been a lot of kind of rewritings of Greek myths, reimaginings of Greek myths and monsters and figures.

Speaker 1 I mean, so how has the Minotaur been depicted in many of these examples of pop culture nowadays?

Speaker 11 I'm sure the Minotaur is in Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, but I haven't read all those books. So I'm sure they're there.
And I'm sure they're probably some computer games.

Speaker 11 Before we talk about chaos, my favorite depiction of the Minotaur is by Mary Reynold. who was writing in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
And she wrote a trilogy about Theseus.

Speaker 11 And the first one's called The King Must Die. And she has a really clever take on the Minotaur.
She has

Speaker 11 the bull,

Speaker 11 the cow, the kind of model made by Daedalus, is for these bull jumpers, because we know in Crete,

Speaker 11 in Knossos, the palace of Knossos, we know from frescoes that

Speaker 11 that there was a bull motif, that there were bull, giant bull horns on some of these buildings, and that we see frescoes of these young acrobats jumping over bulls in a kind of early version of bullfighting, which must have been terrifying, but also impressive.

Speaker 11 So Mary Renault has thesis coming as tribute that they have to, these 14 children, seven boys and seven girls, have to learn how to dance with the bulls and become bull leapers.

Speaker 11 In the bull ring where they're training, they have a practice cow, like the way gymnasts have what do you call it a horse or whatever is this steeple yeah oh yes i know i know what you mean i've forgotten the name for it as well but you see it on the olympics every olympics yes absolutely they're jumping on this whatever this bolster quite creature i wonder if that's actually a holdover for the bull jumpers the bull leapers anyway it's very clever because um they've created like the bull that passive the cow that pacify occupies the framework of a cow or a bull that they can someone can climb inside and operate it from inside and according to mary reynold

Speaker 11 the minotaur is the son asterion

Speaker 11 of

Speaker 11 not minos but pacify

Speaker 11 pacifi who fell in love with a bull leaper from assyria so he's kind of a hairy guy though he was quite young at the time he impregnated her then died in the in the bull ring and she gave birth to this kind of he's human but he's he doesn't look cretan he doesn't have the slim build of many Cretans and the honey-colored skin of many Cretans.

Speaker 11 He's kind of hairier and has bulging eyes and a kind of bull-like neck. So what Mary Reynold has done is made him a person with kind of bestial aspects.

Speaker 11 And what the really clever thing is, she says that when Pacifi was really in love with him, she'd sneak into the bull ring and hide in the cow to wait to meet him. So it's a very clever.

Speaker 11 kind of modern take kind of rationalizing what the what the minotaur might have been that's interesting and i i remember the word now for it is is the pommel horse as with as we're thinking of that that gymnastics oh thank you yeah but but as you're analyzing yes i think like kind of an interesting ancient equivalent and mary renal and mary reynaud fascinating writer and she also did quite a lot on alexander the great too so i definitely know that name well and the book that got me interested in classics that started my whole passion for classics was called the last of the wine and it's set in ancient athens in the time of plato socrates and xenophon I read that when I was 19 and it changed my life.

Speaker 1 She's very, very significant.

Speaker 1 And kind of the same kind of time as Rosemary Sutcliffe and the Eagle of the Ninth and all of those things, you know, very, very impactful stories and brilliant stories too.

Speaker 1 Shall we talk about chaos to finish off, Carol?

Speaker 11 Chaos. Let's talk all about chaos.

Speaker 1 So very new. It's on Netflix and

Speaker 1 it's like a modern imagination of like Crete and

Speaker 1 and several myths and gods and goddesses and the Minotaur also plays a big role in it, doesn't it?

Speaker 11 Yeah, and what I say in my book is one reason we like the myths is they're so archetypal, and the gods and goddesses, they're good to think with, they're good to play with, they're kind of archetypal characters, and we can play around with them and change them.

Speaker 11 And that's what the Greek tragedians did, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus did way back then. And of course, my favorite Aristophanes, who's not a tragedian at all.
But we can play with them.

Speaker 11 And I think you and I were both at the British Museum Museum when they aired the first episode with Charlie the Cavell, the creator, Jeff Goldlam, on a panel afterwards, which was so fascinating.

Speaker 11 And so, yes, it's a retelling of the Greek myths, not using all the gods, but some of them. But Charlie does a really interesting thing with the Minotaur.

Speaker 11 They have that the Minotaur is the child of Minos and that there was a prophecy that the firstborn child of Minos would kill the father.

Speaker 11 So Minos locks away the son, though he's normal, in a labyrinth and almost creates a beast by denying him love, affection,

Speaker 11 physical contact, puts him in a mask of a bull for some reason.

Speaker 11 So again, it's got a kind of explanation and he becomes a very sympathetic character.

Speaker 11 And this is a thing we can do is we can take these monsters and we can kind of, I'm saying monsters with inverted commas, we can rehabilitate them and show what might have caused them to become that way which I think is a great a great thing about many of these modern retellings they give us a new view of the monster though I do think the power of the monster is this deep psychological

Speaker 11 bogeyman

Speaker 1 And that's why, and do you think that's perhaps like the crux as to why figures like monsters such as the Minotaur have remained so popular in our imagination down to the present day is still at the end of the day as you say almost if you're sleeping and you have a nightmare and you're down in that very dark labyrinthine area knowing that there's a monster out to get you you know kind of otherworldly idea do you think that is still kind of the mainstay as to why the minotaur has remained so popular down to the present day yes i think so and i think I think any of these weird combinations of these hybrids are so fascinating to us.

Speaker 11 I think my favorite monster is Medusa in all her terrifying aspect, and especially the way Ray Harryhausen portrayed her. And the idea that if someone looks at you, they can turn you to stone.

Speaker 11 And this is one of the ideas of apatropaic, the power is a face looking out can turn back, reflect back evil spirits, frighten them away.

Speaker 11 And a dog with three heads, a watchdog, but especially one with three heads can frighten away an evil spirit.

Speaker 11 And I think the power of the minotaur against evil spirits and in the subconscious is not him, but I think it's the maze again.

Speaker 11 This idea of the place, his big accessory, this labyrinthine space that I don't dream about him, but I do dream about not getting out of a space.

Speaker 11 And in fact, yesterday I went to the National Gallery in London. Amazing resource.
Oh my gosh, so many masterpiece paintings. Please may it never burn down.
But I couldn't find my way out.

Speaker 1 And I felt a bit like thesis in the labyrinth that's an interesting way to think of it isn't it caroline because if you go to like say a maze in hampton court or somewhere today you know you'll go there with the family and it's a fun activity to try and find the center of the maze but if you add that element to it that actually you're in the maze and you're being chased or there's something out to get you it goes from being a very pleasant experience into being like a location of nightmares.

Speaker 1 And I guess that is kind of the thing with a Minotaur, isn't it?

Speaker 1 That if you're thinking of a maze in that perspective, what's the number one monster you'll think of associated with a labyrinth, with a place you find difficult to get out? It is the Minotaur.

Speaker 11 And you know, it doesn't, this is a weird thing, but I know we're talking about monsters, but there doesn't even have to be a monster.

Speaker 11 Just getting out, getting home is a desperate desire that we all have, isn't it? Just getting out of the maze. So that whole idea that...
Desis, he's killed the monster, but now he's got to get home.

Speaker 11 There's no more monster, but he's still got to get home. So powerful.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And having that lining, that thread to help him out, that guidance.
Caroline, this has been absolutely fantastic. Lastly, but certainly not least, tell us a bit about your new book.

Speaker 11 It's called Pantheon, and it is an illustrated handbook to the Greek gods and goddesses.

Speaker 11 And as I said, it's got little just snippets about the kind of essences of the Greek gods and goddesses and the heroes and some monsters.

Speaker 11 Just enough that you can leaf through and think, oh, that's an interesting little rabbit hole. I'd like to investigate investigate that a bit more.

Speaker 11 Because the myths are so complex and so nuanced and so variegated that you could study one aspect of them almost for your whole life.

Speaker 11 And that's one thing I love about the whole discipline of classics is that it could never be exhausted. And I mean, I've gone down rabbit holes with things like the aegis, the kind of poncho.

Speaker 11 with Medusa's face on it that Athena wears, or the thyrsus, this kind of weird rod that Dionysus' followers hold. And what are these all about?

Speaker 11 And just wonderful little rabbit holes you can dive down and they're so fascinating.

Speaker 11 And if you are a writer, they're great material that you can modernize them, retell them, tell them in the past, tell them in the present, tell them in the future, fantasy, sci-fi.

Speaker 11 you never run out of ideas with the Greek myths.

Speaker 1 And they remain as popular as ever.

Speaker 1 As you said, they're such a popular part of ancient history, hence why we do cover a lot of Greek mythology on the ancients and will continue to do over the weeks, months and years ahead.

Speaker 1 Caroline, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 11 Thank you for having me on one of my favourite podcasts. I'm honoured.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Caroline Lawrence talking you through the story of the Minotaur, its mythological life and legacy down to the 21st century.

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