MinotaurANCIENT

MinotaurANCIENT_Knossos

Knossos was the chief city of Minos’ Crete — cf. Minoan civilization, ca. 3500 – 1100 BC, = bronze age .

King Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, had unnatural relations with the the sacred bull Minos had received from Poseidon and she bore the unnatural offspring, the Minotaur, with a human body and bull’s head. The horror was concealed in the Labyrinth which Minos commissioned of the great Athenian engineer, Daedalus, and the monster was fed by the annual tribute of Athenian boys and girls. Theseus’ arrival ended that. Aided by Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, the Athenian prince navigated the labytinth, killed the Minotaur, and freed the Athenians from their grim tribute.

It is remarkable that this coin, minted nearly a century after the dawn of Periclean golden-age civilization at Athens and a millennium or two after Knossos’ high-point, celebrates iconographically the symbol of the Cretan city’s one-time hegemony.