The pull of the abyss

Mythological Background: Theseus, the Minotaur, and Phaedra

.......Theseus, one of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology, was the son of Aegeus, King of Athens, and Aethra, daughter of the King of Troezen, another Greek city. On his way from Troezen to Athens as a teenager, Theseus rid the countryside of sadistic villains and fearsome monsters. In Athens, his father pronounced him heir to the throne.    
.......Later, on one of his most famous exploits, Theseus traveled to Crete to kill the minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. It was in Crete that Theseus met Phaedra. The minotaur came into existence in the following way:   
.......King Minos of Crete had received a wondrous white bull from the god of the sea, Poseidon (Neptune), with instructions to sacrifice it to Poseidon. However, Minos sacrificed another bull in its place and kept the white bull for himself. In retaliation, Poseidon cast a spell on Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphaë (the mother of Phaedra), that caused Pasiphaë to fall in love with the bull. Poseidon also caused the bull to go mad. After love-drunk Pasiphaë mated with the crazed beast, she gave birth to the monstrous minotaur. To hide this shameful offspring of his wife and thus avoid ridicule, Minos imprisoned the minotaur in a vast labyrinth constructed by a highly skilled architect and sculptor, Daedalus. Meanwhile, the mad white bull was captured by Hercules on one of his adventures, but it was later released and allowed to run wild. After wandering, it ended up in Athens.    
.......When an athletic competition was held in Athens, a son of Minos, Androgeos, was killed while fighting the mad white bull. (According to another account, athletes killed him while he was on his way to another competition in Thebes). Minos blamed the Athenians for his son’s death and waged war against them. When he asked the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, to aid him, Zeus responded by cursing Athens with disease and starvation. There was only one way for Athens to escape ruin: It had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete periodically to be cast into the laybyrinth. The labyrinth of Daedalus was constructed in such a way that the 14 young men and women could not find their way out and were consumed by the minotaur.    
.......Several years passed in which the flower of Athenian youth died in the labyrinth. When the time came for the selection of seven more maidens and seven more men, Theseus volunteered to become one of the victims. Minos had a large family, including several sons and four daughters, among them Phaedra and Ariadne. Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus, was the only person besides Daedalus, who knew the layout of the labyrinth. To save Theseus, she gave him a sword and arranged a way for him to escape the labyrinth. Theseus slew the minotaur and took Ariadne with him on his return to Greece. However, he abandoned her on the island of Naxos while she was sleeping.    
.......While approaching the coast of Greece, Theseus neglected to raise a white sail, a prearranged signal to his father, King Aegeus, that he was alive and well. Consequently, Aegeus killed himself. Shortly thereafter, Theseus became King of Athens. On another adventure, he captured and married Antiope (in some accounts, she is called Hippolyta or Hippolyte) the Queen of the Amazons, a race of warlike women, and fathered a male child by her, Hippolytus. When the Amazons later invaded Athens, Antiope died fighting for Athens and Theseus. By the time Theseus’s son, Hippolytus, had reached his teen years, Theseus had taken a second wife, Phaedra, the daughter of Minos. When she first saw her stepson, she fell in love with him. (This forbidden love is the subject of Racine’s play.)    
.......Meanwhile, the architect Daedalus fell out of favor with Minos, and the king imprisoned him in the labyrinth. However, Daedalus designed himself a pair of wings that enabled him to fly out of the labyrinth. He took refuge in Sicily, where he made friends with the king, Cocalus. After Minos followed him there, the daughters of Cocalus killed him by pouring boiling water on him while he was bathing. Minos then became a judge in the Underworld. 

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