MINOTAUR.
A monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, the Minotaur was the offspring of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, and the sacred bull Minos had received from Poseidon. The creature was imprisoned in the labyrinth, a great maze devised by Daedalus under Minos’s orders. He was fed an annual tribute of Athenian youths and maidens until Theseus, aided by Minos’s daughter Ariadne, entered the maze and killed him.
      In the arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Minotaur and labyrinth often symbolize man’s bestiality and his struggle to control it.
      See also Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë