I need to rant about this - the Minotaur.
I have never heard of someone talking about this and I really don't understand why, because I find it to be a very interesting topic to discuss.
In case anyone doesn't remember the myth, there it is: the Minotaur was born from the union between Pasiphae, the wife of Minos king of Crete, and a beautiful, snow-white bull sent to him by the god Poseidon, who wanted it to be sacrificed in his temple. Minos, however, was so fascinated by the bull that he refused to slaughter it and offered another one in his place, this angered Poseidon, who took revenge upon Minos by making Pasiphae fall madly in love with the bull. Unable to resist the temptation, she asked Daedalus to build her a hollowed wooden cow in which she hid until the white bull finally mated with her. She became pregnant and gave birth to, in fact, the Minotaur, who was then named Asterius. He had the head and the tail of a bull, and the rest of the body of a man. Minos was horrified at the view of Pasiphae's offspring and ordered Daedalus and his son Icarus to build a labyrinth in which Asterius would be confined and from which he could not escape. Once a year, fourteen Athenian young boys and girls were sent to the labyrinth to be eaten by the Minotaur, as a recompense for the death of Minos' son, Androgeus, whom the Athenians had once killed out of jealousy for beating them at the Panathenaic Games. This went on for three years until Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to kill Asterius and free both Crete and his home city. Theseus managed to win against the Minotaur by impaling his head with one of his horns and later found his way out of the labyrinth thanks to Ariadne's ball of thread.
Now, I know that as a Hellenic I should consider the myths to be simple guidelines for this religion instead of absolute truths, however I think we can all agree that Ancient Greeks thought in a very different way from us people of the 21ᵗʰ century, and that we are allowed to give our interpretation to the myths, even if it is different from the original meaning. So, without further doing, here's why I'm not comfortable with the way Asterius is depicted in this myth ( and yes I am calling him by his name because he deserves to be treated in a humane way ).
First of all, he didn't do anything to deserve the bad things that happened to him, yet he is the one suffering the most in this myth. It's was Minos' s fault if the white bull wasn't sacrificed, yet the story doesn't mention anything bad happening to him after the birth of Asterius. Yes, maybe this event was the punishment itself, but let's be honest, Minos was lucky considering how creative the gods can be when it comes to taking revenge upon mortals in the myths, Poseidon could have gone a lot harder on him. Minos didn't really face the consequences of his actions, and as far as I can imagine, he may have had to suppress the scandal in his court and not much other than that. I can't really blame Pasiphae though, because she was under Poseidon's curse and, like the majority of women in the Greek myths, she had a passive role in this story and she had to suffer anyway to bore a son she didn't want in the first place... but Asterius? What did he do to be treated with such cruelty? Did he anger the gods in some way? Did he commit any crime? No. His only “fault” was that of being born with a horrifying aspect, and for this he was secluded in a labyrinth when he was like a day old, helpless and scared.
The worst part, I think, is that he was alone, and not only physically. Think of Medusa, for instance; when she got cursed by Athena to become the monster we all know, the other Gorgons adopted her as a sister; she may have been scared, but she had someone by her side who would understand her and carry part of her pain. Asterius was born in a world in which no one was like him, nobody understood him and, worst of all, no one 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘥 to understand him. They threw him in a cage like he wasn't even a sentient being and just left him there, and in order to survive he had to eat people, the same people that, maybe, he wanted to become friends with, if he only had the possibility... After all, he had a human heart, able to feel and suffer like everyone else's. Nobody has ever shown him a bit of empathy, yet it's not certain if he was actually evil; as I said before, he had to eat humans in order to survive, because those people were probably the only thing that could keep him alive, since no other source of nutrient is mentioned in the myth.
And lastly, he had to fight for a life he spent suffering, only to be remembered as the horrendous evil monster killed by the glorious hero in a shiny armor. ( just to be clear: I fricking hate Theseus in all the myths he's in ). I am honestly sick of this cliché concept: “he's the villain because he's bad. He's bad because he's the villain” and I am truly flattered by the fact that we are starting to empathize with “the bad guys” and trying to see things from their perspective, or more in general, that we are giving more profound interpretations to the myths, but while I see this done with characters such as Medusa, Achilles or Helen of Troy, I never see no one put Asterius under this light.
In conclusion I think that, sometimes, the villains can teach us more about being good than the actual heroes of the story, and this is why we always need to search for more than what we can see and go deeper than what we perceive.
credits: “ 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘶𝘳 ” by Pedro Requejo Novoa.
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
