THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 
tan kings of a certain type." With that, 
however, we need not concern ourselves 
at present, further than to notice that the 
bearer of the name appears in the 
legends in many different characters, 
scarcely consistent with one another or 
with his being a single person. 
The Minos who is most familiar to 
us in Greek story is not so much the 
lawgiver and priest of God as the great 
sea-king and tyrant, the overlord of the 
^gean, whose vengeance was defeated 
by the bravery of the Athenian hero, 
Theseus. From this point of view, 
Minos was the first of men who recog- 
nized the importance of sea-power, and 
used it to establish the supremacy of his 
island kingdom. 
But the great King was by no means 
so fortunate in his domestic relationships 
as in his foreign advertures. The do- 
mestic skeleton in his case was the com- 
posite monster the Minotaur, half man, 
half bull, fabled to have been the fruit 
of a monstrous passion on the part of 
the king's wife, Pasiphse. This monster 
was kept shut up within a vast and in- 
tricate building called the Labyrinth, con- 
trived for Minos by his renowned artif- 
icer, Daedalus. Further, when his own 
son, Androgeos, had gone to Athens to 
contend in the Panathenaic games, hav- 
ing overcome all the other Greeks in the 
sports, he fell a victim to the suspicion 
of yEgeus, the King of Athens, who 
caused him to be slain, either by way- 
laying him on the road to Thebes or by 
sending him against the Marathonian 
bull. 
In his sorrow and righteous anger, 
Minos raised a great fleet and levied 
war upon Athens ; and, having wasted 
Attica with fire and sword, he at length 
reduced the land to such straits that 
King ^geus and his Athenians were 
glad to submit to the hard terms which 
were asked of them. The demand of 
Minos was that every ninth year Athens 
should send him as tribute seven youths 
and seven maidens. These were selected 
by lot, or, according to another version 
of the legend, chosen by Minos himself, 
and on their arrival in Crete were cast 
into the Labyrinth, to become the prey 
of the monstrous Minotaur. 
THi;SEUS, the; deliverer OE ATHENS 
The first and second installments of 
this ghastly tribute had already been 
paid ; but when the time of the third 
tribute was drawing nigh, the predes- 
tined deliverer of Athens appeared in 
the person of the hero Theseus. Theseus 
was the unacknowledged son of King 
/Egeus and the Princess Aithra of Troe- 
zen. He had been brought up by his 
mother at Troezen, and on arriving at 
early manhood had set out to make his 
way to the court of ^geus and secure 
acknowledgment as the rightful son of 
the Athenian king. 
The legend tells how on his way to 
Athens he cleared the knds through 
which he journeyed of the pests which 
had infested them. Sinnis, the pine- 
bender, who tied his miserable victims 
to the tops of two pine trees bent to- 
ward one another and then allowed the 
trees to spring back, the young hero 
dealt with as he had dealt with others ; 
Kerkuon, the wrestler, was slain by him 
in a wrestling bout ; Procrustes, who en- 
ticed travelers to his house and made 
them fit his bed, stretching the short 
upon the rack and lopping the limbs of 
the over-tall, had his own measure 
meted to him ; and various other plagues 
of society were abated by the young 
hero. 
Not long after his arrival at Athens 
and acknowledgment by his father the 
time came round when the Minoan her- 
alds should come to Athens to claim the 
victims for the Minotaur. Seeing the 
grief that prevailed in the city, and the 
anger of the people against his father, 
^geus, whom they accounted the cause 
of their misfortune, Theseus determined 
that, if possible, he would make an end 
of this humiliation and misery, and ac- 
cordingly offered himself as one of the 
seven youths who were to be devoted to 
the Minotaur. 
^geus was loth to part with his newly- 
found son, but at length he consented 
to the venture ; and it was agreed that 
if Theseus succeeded in vanquishing the 
Minotaur and bringing back his com- 
rades in safety he should hoist white 
sails on his returning galley instead of 
