Minotaur
MIN-uh-tor
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe bull-headed thing kept at the centre of the Labyrinth on Crete, fed on Athenian children sent as tribute.
Plutarch, writing about Theseus, reports the versions available to him and notes that some rationalised the story entirely, making the Minotaur a harsh Cretan general named Taurus. He sets the accounts side by side rather than choosing.
Theseus went with the tribute and killed it. The thread that let him find the way out was Ariadne's.
Sources
- Apollod. 3.1.4
- Apollod. 3.15.8
- Plut. Thes. 15-19
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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