A half-man, half-bull monster.
Locked in a giant maze.
Waiting for its next meal of human flesh.
This is the bizarre myth of the Minotaur.
An angry, savage freak of nature,
that endures as a timeless symbol of the beast inside all men.
But beneath its story lurks a stunning reality.
A real world of human sacrifice, bestiality, war
and the remains of an actual labyrinth.
This is the myth of the Minotaur...
and the truth behind it.
A heavy door clanks shut behind you.
A dimly lit maze of corridors lies ahead.
The stench of death hangs heavy in the air.
You are trapped in the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
And there is no way out.
The story of the Minotaur was a horror story for the ancient Greeks.
The labyrinth was a chamber of death.
Those that got locked inside of it knew that there was only one fate
and that's to be devoured by a horrible, ravenous, man-eating beast.
This half-man, half-animal would rip you piece to piece
and consume your flesh.
The Minotaur is the mutant child of a human mother
and a bull father.
He has the body of an enormously strong, powerful man.
But the head of a bull with horns.
On the one hand, it's part beast.
And this beast is ravenous and hungry
and kills and even eats the flesh of people that it has killed.
On the other hand, the Minotaur is half-human
and it has a kind of vulnerability from that
in which its humanity it's trapped inside of its bestiality.
At its core, this myth represents the battle between reason and savagery,
between order and chaos.
The ancient Greeks who told the story prided themselves on being civilised.
One of the things that the Greeks really did believe in
was that human reason could do a lot.
But the Minotaur was the enemy of reason.
A symbol of the animal instincts trapped inside all men.
The Minotaur, the monster, was the untamable part of nature
that the Greeks were trying to get a hold of.
This was the one thing that they could not control.
According to the myth, this is where the Minotaur lives.
On the island of Crete.
At the time when the story takes place,
Crete dominates the Greek world the way the Minotaur dominates the labyrinth.
In the late Bronze Age, Crete was the most important power
in that part of the Mediterranean.
Places like Athens and Sparta which, in the classical period,
would really become the most significant powers,
weren't anything very important at all.
In fact, they had to pay tribute to Crete
because it was the major power in the region.
In the myth, the Minotaur was created to punish the king of Crete, Minos,
after he tried to outwit a god.
Every year it was customary that King Minos sacrifice his most prized bull
as an offering to the Sea God, Poseidon.
But one year his herd produced a calf so beautiful, so perfect,
that Minos couldn't bear to part with it.
He sacrificed a lesser bull in its place.
But Poseidon was watching.
Any time you try, in Greek mythology, to outsmart a god,
you're gonna lose.
When Poseidon saw this, he said,
"Ok. You like your bull so much?
"I'm going to make your woman like your bull. "
And so he made Minos' wife lust for the bull.
Minos' wife, Pasiphaë, falls in love with the bull.
Pasiphaë's desire for the bull,
I think, symbolises a kind of animalistic lust.
All of us like to think of ourselves as very rational creatures
but in reality all of us know at out core there's some piece of us
that's driven by pure animalistic desire.
The Queen hatches an elaborate plan to seduce the bull.
She climbs into a cow costume and lingers in the pasture where it grazes,
waiting for the beast to approach.
It's a very strange myth, this one, because Pasiphaë essentially
engages in an act of bestiality.
She's in love with this bull.
She wants to have sex with this bull.
It seemed to be a preoccupation of ancient Greeks and Romans
as to what the proper mode of sexual behaviour was.
And having sex with animals was one of those taboos
that got kind of richly worked out in their mythology.
In the real world, we see these mythic scenes,
famous scenes of ancient bestiality are performed in the Colosseum.
You have women slaves who would be forced to copulate with bulls
in order to entertain.
Often in these real life spectacles, the ancients were acting out
Queen Pasiphaë's mythical encounter with a bull.
In the story, it isn't long before her strategy succeeds.
The bull spies her, is overcome with amorous desire,
mounts her... Nine months later,
you've got yourself a Minotaur.
The birth of monsters is very often associated with sinfulness,
or similar kind of wrongdoing.
Certainly this is both of those things.
Because Minos didn't keep his end of the bargain,
because Pasiphaë indulged in an unnatural desire,
the child is born monstrous and deformed.
A half-human, half-bull baby boy.
Destined to become a horror.
He's a monster. That's how we know him.
But at the same time, he seems to be a victim of his fate,
and that's why I have mixed feelings about the Minotaur.
I cannot really condemn him.
The Minotaur has a strange name.
His father isn't Minos, but the first half of his name
comes from the name Minos.
The second half, "tauros", is the Greek word for a bull.
So Minotaur means the bull of Minos.
To the ancients,
this man-bull hybrid was a powerful and frightening concept.
Bulls were a central part of Greek civilisation.
In fact, they were even worshipped as gods.
There were a lot of sacrifices and rituals around bull cults
all across the Eastern Mediterranean.
A bull represents male virility and strength
and that's exactly what the bull was religiously,
an icon representing male potency and fertility,
great strength and power as well.
The memory of the power of the bull
carried through into Judeo-Christian times,
and we see in pictures of the Nativity
the bull breathing in to the Baby Jesus
with its life force.
According to the myth, the tyrannical King Minos is furious
when the Minotaur is born.
And decides to use it as a weapon
against anyone who dares to challenge his power.
He devises a sinister plan to build the world's most terrifying prison,
and makes his beastly stepson its man-eating warden.
To build it, Minos turns to his resident engineering genius, Daedalus.
Daedalus is the world's most famous ancient builder.
He's like Thomas Edison and Frank Lloyd Wright rolled into one.
He's able to construct beautiful monuments
and he's also able to construct flying machines,
wonders of ancient technology.
Daedalus makes plans for a prison with no barred cells,
just a massive, winding maze.
It would be so vast, so impossible to navigate,
that even he could barely make it out alive.
And in its heart would lie the Minotaur
waiting for its prey.
It was a series of passages and stairways,
there is some sort of mystical or strange effect inside the labyrinth
that so confuses those who walk through it
that they don't know where they are in short time.
Dark, disorienting, deadly.
This mythical labyrinth would be terrifying.
But is it more than just a myth?
Today there is an underground maze on the island of Crete
with an eerie resemblance to the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
The cave of Mesara.
It's an ancient underground quarry
that according to local lore may have inspired the myth.
Winding passageways stretch for over two miles in no particular order.
In fact, most people who dare to enter run a cable with them
to make sure that they don't get lost.
The same tactic will prove crucial for the Minotaur's victims later in the myth.
Chisel marks found along these tunnel walls prove the caves are man-made.
That they were dug with ancient tools.
For centuries, visitors who came to explore this place
were convinced they had found the home of the Minotaur,
and many of them left their mark.
Today, explorers still take on the challenge of navigating the labyrinth.
Their objective is to reach this central room
where it is said the Minotaur once dwelled.
They come here to beat their fears,
and if they win, they accomplished the mission.
They write their names on it and go out happy.
It would be very nice if it were the labyrinth.
Everybody wants to know where the idea of the labyrinth came from
and when you see caves like this,
right away the idea must have come to the people
that this might have been the lair of the Minotaur.
An ancient man-made maze on the same island
where the myth is said to have taken place.
It's the perfect candidate for the Minotaur's labyrinth
in every way but one.
Most experts think the myth is older than the cave.
It was worked very late in Greek-Roman times
and there are recorded visits by many pilgrims during this period.
But the actual myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur
came much, much earlier.
If Mesara isn't the place that inspired the myth of the labyrinth,
what is?
The hunt for clues leads back to the myth.
With his horrifying maze complete, Crete's King Minos shifts his focus
and hunts for its first victims.
It's meal time for the Minotaur.
According to an ancient myth,
the island of Crete is home to a half-man, half-bull monster
who hungrily patrols a dark labyrinth.
The labyrinth itself is so confusing,
even its builder can barely find the way out.
Inside, the Minotaur awaits its first victims,
hungry for human flesh.
Meanwhile, 200 miles north in a small city-state called Athens,
athletes have gathered from all over the Mediterranean to compete
in a series of sporting challenges.
It's an early precursor to the Olympic Games.
Among the competitors is Prince Androgeus,
the son of Crete's King Minos,
and the half brother of the Minotaur.
Minos' son, Androgeus, won every contest -
running, throwing, singing. He was a star.
And it so upset a number of the Athenian youth
that they got into a drunken brawl and went and killed him.
The son of a King murdered in cold blood.
This means war.
Once the news reaches Minos, of course, his grief is overwhelming
and his rage and thirst for revenge is enormous.
King Minos decides to punish the Athenians in the worst possible way.
He will feed them to the Minotaur.
The Cretan navy drops anchor at Athens and delivers an ultimatum.
Minos demanded that they send
seven male and female virgins
to be sacrificed to the Minotaur.
Virgins were a priced commodity in the ancient world
because it was believed their purity made them closer to the gods.
They would be put on a ship
and the ship would take them,
in very degrading circumstances, to Crete.
They would be led crying and in great tears...
into the labyrinth where they would be consumed by the monster.
So goes the myth, but what is the connection to reality?
Here, the story symbolises an actual historical conflict.
An epic struggle between an aging super-power and an up-and-coming state.
Early in Greek history, Athens and Crete were real life enemies,
but Crete's massive navy gave it a decided advantage.
In both myth and reality, it was David versus Goliath.
In the Minotaur myth is pretty clearly a symbolic overlay of real history.
Crete was a very powerful civilisation and they kind of lorded it over
the city-states on mainland Greece.
When Minos made this outrageous demand, what it was
was a reflection of the Cretan dominance of that entire area.
The Athenians told the Minotaur story as political propaganda.
The Minotaur represented the tyranny of Crete.
The labyrinth was Crete's nearly inescapable power.
And the victims symbolised the suffering of Athens.
The myth's purpose was to make the Cretans seem barbaric and evil.
And it worked.
For the Greeks themselves who embellished the story over the centuries,
it was a very important proof
that they and their gods and their rational thinking
were superior to the Cretans and their bulls and their monsters.
In the myth, Athens is forced to send human sacrifices to the Minotaur
every nine years...
or face all-out war with Crete.
But why nine years?
It seems from their records they had an understanding
of the movement of the Moon through various constellations
that go through about a nine-year cycle.
And that would be then the basis of the nine-year sacrifice.
Whenever a full moon falls on the Equinox,
it'll be time to send fresh sacrifices to the beast.
As the first victims are being locked inside the labyrinth,
a pivotal event is unfolding across the sea.
In a small kingdom 50 miles from Athens
a baby boy is being born. His name is Theseus.
He's one of the first great heroes of Greek myth.
The one who is destined to challenge the Minotaur.
The birth of Theseus is of pre-eminent importance
in terms of Athenian national identity.
Theseus belongs to an older order of heroes.
They are characterized by tremendous strength,
tremendous bravery and also great brain power.
Theseus is the son of a beautiful Greek princess,
and not one, but two, powerful fathers.
On the night he was conceived
his mother had sex with both Aegeus, King of Athens,
and Poseidon, god of the sea.
What usually happens is that the mother will sleep with the human father
and also sleep, in the same timeframe, with the divine father.
So that the child is fertilised by two people simultaneously.
Having dual paternity allows him to both inherit the throne from Aegeus,
as well as have access to things like Poseidon's special favours.
This two father scenario was a common plotline in ancient myths.
It's even something real life rulers often claimed for themselves.
One of the, perhaps best known, is Alexander the Great,
who celebrates himself as being partially divine.
Later on, in the Roman period, the Roman emperors, starting with Augustus,
claimed that. They became gods.
It gives you a kind of authority if you can say,
I'm actually the child of a god.
According to the myth, when Theseus is born
King Aegeus buries his sandals and a sword beneath a huge rock.
He tells Theseus' mother
that when the boy is strong enough to lift that rock
he should have to claim his rightful place as Prince of Athens.
Nine years later, Crete again demands that seven men and seven women
be sent as tribute to die in the Minotaur's labyrinth.
The kingdom needs a hero.
The third time Crete demands its tribute, Theseus is ready.
He is finally strong enough to lift the rock
that hides his father's sword and sandals.
He vows to enter the labyrinth, battle the Minotaur,
and free Athens from the tyranny of Crete.
It's the classic face-off between monster and hero.
And modern evidence has revealed some shocking truth behind it.
The city of Athens is in mourning.
Once again it is time to send human sacrifices to the Minotaur.
The innocent victims demanded by King Minos, the tyrant of Crete.
Those chosen are sure to die.
But there is one who vows to challenge fate.
The Prince of Athens, Theseus.
He is anxious to prove his bravery
and to free his kingdom.
All heroes have to commit great acts in order to gain their status.
So he needs to go out and do something great.
And that is gonna be to stop the Athenians from having to submit to Minos
and submit their children to the Minotaur.
The stage is set.
It's Theseus, heroic symbol of man at his best
against the Minotaur, the savage reflection of man at his worst.
Before Theseus departs for Crete,
his father gives him an important order.
When, and if he returns to Athens,
he must hoist the white sail instead of the black.
That way, when the ship appears on the horizon,
the king will know his son is safe.
According to the myth, this is where Theseus was headed.
Knossos, the capital city of King Minos and the Cretans.
The ancient Greeks believed this was the home of the Minotaur.
A scene of horrific crimes against humanity.
Today its ruins still hold clues
about the reality behind the myth.
At the height of Crete's power, between 700 and 450 BC,
this city was home to 100.000 people.
At its centre was a vast palace with a complex layout.
In fact, some experts believe it was the original inspiration
for the labyrinth.
It must have been extremely difficult
for anyone to find their way all around that huge palace,
which had something like a thousand rooms in it,
and five storeys in some places.
There were many passageways and there were no halls.
The passageways went from one little room to another,
so you could not find a direct line anywhere.
My guess is that when the Greeks first saw this
they couldn't make sense of it
so that's where the notion of the labyrinth came from.
They would have imagined it as a dungeony,
dark, series of corridors
that violated the Greek sense of symmetry.
Greeks like symmetry.
Modern excavations inside the palace
have only strengthened its connexion to the Minotaur myth.
Throughout the site, signs of bull worship can be found.
One fresco found in the palace even depicts a young man battling a bull.
It's a scene that seems torn almost directly from the myth.
The depiction from the Knossos palace shows a naked young man
somersaulting over the top of a bull of large horns
that seems to be enraged and chasing him.
An ancient palace that looks like a maze,
filled with artefacts related to bulls.
It's easy to see how this place might have inspired the myth.
But the connexions do not end there.
Archaeologists have unearthed evidence suggesting
the existence of a real King Minos.
A throne room with its seat still perfectly intact.
It's the oldest ever found in Europe dating back 3,500 years.
Also found was an inscription in an ancient language
that may even mention the king by name.
In the archives of the temple of Crete, there were stone tablets
which have inscribed on them words which looked to be
like the name of King Minos.
So one word, "mi-nu-te", a second word, "mwi-nu ro-ja",
which could mean "Minos the King" - "ro-ja" is a title for royalty.
These clues suggest King Minos may have actually lived.
But the most intriguing connexion to the Minotaur myth
appears on another tablet found at the site.
It depicts an offering to a so-called Mistress of the Labyrinth.
Here, in writing, is a direct reference to the maze of the Minotaur.
It's an unmistakable connexion between the City of Knossos
and the myth.
But who was this Mistress of the Labyrinth?
Her identity is an intriguing mystery.
Experts believe it was a woman of great importance at the palace,
a high ranking priestess, or even the daughter of the king.
In the myth, King Minos' daughter is Ariadne,
and she plays an important role in the rest of the story.
We don't know who's the Mistress of the Labyrinth was,
but it could have been Ariadne inasmuch as she was entitled to be the priestess
of the Temple, because she was the first daughter of King Minos.
From the moment Theseus arrives in Crete to be sacrificed
Princess Ariadne is drawn to him.
Ariadne notices Theseus' bearing, his courage, his unblinking gaze
and is immediately smitten with him.
She's sort of overcome by the power of her love for Theseus
and she immediately decides that she's going to help him,
because she doesn't' want him to die
in the labyrinth as all the other figures do.
But Ariadne must act fast.
She seeks out Daedalus, the designer of the labyrinth
and begs him to explain how to escape it.
What he gives her is a clue.
In old English translations of this myth,
the word "clue" means a ball of twine.
This is what Daedalus gives to Ariadne.
And it's how the modern word "clue" originated.
And Daedalus said, "Why don't you just use a ball of twine?
"Tie one end to the door and then unravel it as you go into the labyrinth.
"Once you're in the centre, you can find you way back out
"by following the twine. "
We have continued to use balls of twine in underwater exploration.
The divers will tie the end of the twine to an opening in a wreck or a cave,
go inside, explore and then follow the twine back out again.
Reason, which is what the Greeks honoured more than anything else,
is the thing that solves the problem.
A very simple answer to what seems to be an impossible situation.
Ariadne secretly visits Theseus in his holding cell
and offers him her clue on one condition -
he must marry her...
if he survives.
When Theseus meets Ariadne he's sort of in a bind.
He's going into the middle of the labyrinth,
about to be eaten alive by a Minotaur,
and when Ariadne volunteers to help him he really doesn't have much of a choice.
It's either do what she asks or take his chances,
and he's not going to take chances.
The next morning, 14 victims are locked inside the labyrinth.
Lambs right for the slaughter.
With his ball of twine in hand, Theseus leads the way into the maze.
Theseus ties off the ball of twine at the door
and starts to walk step by step through this dark, dank tunnel.
Theseus has been offered as a human sacrifice.
It's a concept that is hard to fathom today, but evidence suggests
that the real ancient Cretans not only sacrificed humans,
they also may have eaten them.
Theseus, the Prince of Athens,
is leading his fellow victims deeper into the labyrinth,
determined to confront the Minotaur head-on.
He has a ball of twine, a clue,
so that he can find his way back out.
As the beastly growls of the Minotaur grow louder,
Theseus is resolute, but those trapped with him
are beginning to unravel.
As the victims walk through the labyrinth
one can imagine how terrified they must have been.
Just think about going into that dark space,
and then as you wandered, not being able to see anything...
They knew that somewhere else in this maze,
there was this horrible man-eating creature that would devour them.
You never know at what point you're going to encounter the monster.
Deep inside the maze, the Minotaur stirs.
He hears the screams of frightened victims headed his way.
And he's ready for his next feast of flesh.
This is the enemy Theseus must defeat
in order to free Athens from the tyranny of Crete.
So goes the myth, but what is the link to reality?
The tension between Athens and Crete during the Bronze Age
is well documented.
But were the Cretans really as savage as the myth suggests?
At Knossos palace, excavations have turned up possible evidence
that suggests some truth behind the story.
Inscriptions found at the site have been interpreted by some
as offerings made to the gods.
Human offerings.
There are records of a female servant being offered,
and also ten males being offered.
Real people killed in ritual sacrifice,
just like the victims of the Minotaur in the myth.
The suggestion is that there actually was human sacrifice
being practiced on Crete.
But the evidence extends beyond inscriptions.
There are also bones that bear the markers or cold-blooded murder.
In 1979, over 300 of them were unearthed in Knossos.
Unbelievably all of them belonged to children.
About 25% of them bore cut marks made by a fine blade.
The type that would have been used to remove flesh from bone.
The bones had the marks of knives,
they had cut marks on the sides of the bones,
so it's hard to get around the fact
that there was butchery going on here,
perhaps even cannibalism.
I don't know how else one could interpret this kind of evidence.
Sheep bones were also uncovered in the same place as the human bones.
All were slashed in a similar manner.
These grate marks look a lot like the kind of marks that result from butchery
of animals that are being prepared to eat.
This suggests that the ancient Cretans were not only sacrificing humans,
but eating them.
Is the Minotaur's thirst for human flesh
an encoded message about cannibalism?
It's the most repulsive and abhorrent crime we can ever even imagine.
It's a perfect way to demonize someone, so we can imagine that
the ancient Greeks would have told the story about their great enemy, Crete,
that not only were they horrible people, they were monsters and even still
they were cannibals.
The myth continues.
The labyrinth's corridors are cloaked in darkness.
It is impossible for Theseus to find his way by sight.
But the grunts and growls of the Minotaur are getting louder.
They are his compass.
His ball of twine, his clue, is small now,
a quarter the size it was when Theseus entered the maze.
The beast is near.
He smells the stench of blood on the walls,
he sees the bones of the poor beast's prior victims.
He rounds a corner and sees a sleeping hulk.
Even the breath of the Minotaur fills him with fear.
But this is the difference between heroes and us ordinary folks,
the hero feels the fear, masters it and pursues the great deed.
Theseus ambushes, catching the beast half asleep.
Theseus approaches, the Minotaur is startled, jumps up and attacks.
Axe meets sword as man battles beast.
The future of Athens and Crete hangs in the balance.
In the pre-dawn hours, the sounds of struggle pierce the night.
Inside the labyrinth, Theseus has the Minotaur cornered.
He then pounces on it, attacks...
Before the beast even knows what hit him,
Theseus has the upper hand.
The Minotaur struggles and gasps.
The hero goes in for the kill.
The Minotaur, this tortured, trapped, terrible soul is dead.
Theseus, son of Poseidon and Prince of Athens,
has destroyed the curse of King Minos.
You can imagine that his heart is pounding, his adrenaline is pumping,
he's covered with the muck and blood of this dead beast
and all of the other human beings that this beast has ingested over the years.
That the forces of reason as embodied by Theseus
overcame the forces of irrationality
as embodied by the Minotaur.
But there's no time to celebrate his victory.
Daybreak is approaching.
Theseus needs to move fast
if he's going to escape the wrath of King Minos.
Once he's killed the Minotaur it's not quite over because
Minos is not gonna be happy about this, of course.
So he has to retrace his steps, get out of the labyrinth,
and then get back on to the ship.
He follows his thread back out and leads the still living youths of Athens
out of the labyrinth.
I can imagine the joy that must have come over the kids when they saw
that their fate was not what they expected,
that their fate was actually changed by the deed of the hero.
Ariadne, the Princess of Crete,
has spent a restless night listening for any sign of Theseus' survival.
He's promised to marry her if he escapes the Minotaur alive
and she intends to hold him to it.
Just before dawn she joins him and their ship sets sail for Athens.
It's a defining moment in Greek mythology.
When Theseus slays the Minotaur the action is really a symbolic act
in which we have a hero of Athens
who's finally overthrowing the yoke of Crete.
It's a symbol of Greece beating Crete.
It's a symbol of human bravery and ingenuity.
So all these stories they inspired the young citizens
to be faithful to their country
to be able to sacrifice themselves for their city's glory
and ultimately to become true citizens of a democratic city.
Theseus leaves Crete a hero,
but his voyage home will end in tragedy.
When he left to fight the Minotaur Theseus promised his earthly father,
King Aegeus, that he would hoist a white sail if he returned home alive
to signal his victory.
Every morning for months, Aegeus would visit the same seaside cliff
looking for any sign of the ship.
But when it finally appears on the horizon,
its sail is black.
The King is inconsolable
thinking his son has been devoured by the Minotaur.
In his grief, Aegeus leaps to his death in the sea below.
To this day, that sea is called the Aegean,
after Theseus' father.
When Theseus fails to raise the white sail,
the original ancient tale doesn't tell us any motivations as to why he forgets,
but in the end, the original myth,
seems to suggest a kind of carefreeness of youth.
That's the easiest explanation.
He was so excited by his victory, he was on his way home,
and he simply just forgot to do it.
Aegeus' sudden death is a shocking development.
Theseus comes ashore not only as the liberator of Athens,
but as its new King.
The King who, according to the myth,
would transform the city from a backwater outpost
into a regional super-power.
In this myth, Athens' rise to power is definitely credited to Theseus.
In fact, the myth seems to have been written, in part, to prove this.
In adopting Theseus as their founding hero,
the Athenians were really making a statement.
They were saying that this long-time domination of Crete was now over
and that there was a new top dog in town, and it was Athens.
Athens would go on to become the Greek world's dominant city state.
While Crete would collapse and be conquered.
But long after both kingdoms have faded into history,
the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur endures.
And like every good myth
it reveals insights into human nature
that are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago.
There's a lot of things that one can read into the Minotaur's story,
you can imagine the labyrinth as being the human mind,
a dark place that we constantly explore in a conscious state,
the animal nature, the nature that compels us to kill.
These myths reveal to us in a uniquely powerful way
parts of ourselves that we otherwise keep hidden.
Hidden urges and desires,
hidden means by which we deal with the world.
The most fundamental struggles of human experience.