Surprise Endings

      To open this week, I’d like to pose a trivia question for the mythology experts in the audience: How does Minos die?

      Minos comes up a lot here because he’s an influential iteration of the ‘evil tyrant’ archetype. In the past I’ve described him refusing to fulfill vows to the gods, terrorizing people with monsters, and (the ultimate mark of the tyrant) demanding human sacrifice. He has more skeletons in his closet: when his navy was besieging Athens, a Helpful Princess fell in love with him and betrayed her city to him by killing her father, but he repaid her devotion by killing her. He was also an unrepentant nonmonogamist, against the wishes of his wife, to the extent that his wife put a curse on him to kill all his mistresses. Beyond that, he lost one of his sons and made a series of increasingly irrational demands in the course of finding him. (When his son went missing, Minos first seized a magician named Polyidus and demanded that Polyidus find his son. When Polyidus divined that the child had fallen into a giant pot of honey and drowned, Minos imprisoned him with the child’s dead body and refused to release him until he raised the child from the dead. When Polyidus actually completed this--a feat that had never before been accomplished in Greek myth, and that would only be repeated once--Minos demanded that Polyidus teach his son all his magic. Polyidus, deciding that he didn’t like having Minos as a boss, took off at the first possible opportunity.) You can see how Minos acquired a reputation as an evil tyrant, and yet for all these wicked deeds, none of them directly led to his death--not even his betrayal of a vow to Poseidon, not even his defilement of religious ceremony via human sacrifice. Evil tyrants, after committing many unforgiveable offenses, are usually done in by avenging young heroes (often their own grandsons or nephews, as in the cases of Acrisius or Amulius). But this isn’t what happens to Minos.

      To talk about Minos’ death, you have to start with Daedalus. This is quite a famous story--Minos relishes the prospect of killing people with his new monster the Minotaur, but first he needs somewhere to keep the Minotaur where it won’t kill him. So he hires Daedalus, the most ingenious engineer in the world, to build an inescapable maze. Unfortunately for him, his daughter solves the maze with cunning manipulation of the fiber arts, and Theseus gallantly whacks off the monster’s head. Minos, raging impotently at the death of his monster, imprisons the engineer and his son Icarus in the maze, apparently not realizing that the person who designed the maze is the one best qualified to find a way out. And this is precisely what Daedalus does. He builds two sets of wings and the two of them fly straight out of Crete and over the Mediterranean, although only one of them comes through alive. Daedalus grieves for his son and takes up residence in Sicily. He lives the quiet life of an exile, which is marred only slightly by an episode in which he kills his new apprentice for being smarter than he is.

      Minos continues to play the evil tyrant, and he abandons all his royal duties in Crete to scour the world for his escaped engineer (whose crime, I want to stress, was designing a deathtrap whose fatality rate turned out to be less than 100 percent). He travels in a murderous rage, bearing the implements of his revenge: a snail shell and a thread. Minos claims that he is looking for someone to thread the snail shell, secretly knowing that only Daedalus would be clever enough to solve the problem. When a certain foreign king on Sicily returns the puzzle solved, Minos deduces that the king got Daedalus to solve the riddle and begins making murderous demands that the king hand over Daedalus. The Sicilian king, following hospitality custom, invites Minos to take a bath before they sit down to dinner and negotiate. In the process, he hands Minos over to his young daughters, who proceed to murder Minos by drenching him in boiling water, and teach him a strict lesson about setting down too many orders. (Minos is not the only Greek king to be murdered by innocent young princesses--Jason’s antagonist Pelias meets his end in a similar way--but you might note that the girls who murder Pelias are trying to perform an immortality ritual that they end up botching, whereas the girls who murder Minos are deliberately trying to thwart a murderer before he kills again.) I find it fascinatingly ironic that Minos manages to survive so many betrayals, so many avenging heroes, wars, monsters, and domestic treachery--but he lets his guard down when a host invites him to take a bath, and he falls victim to some princesses with jars of water.

      (If the ploy of killing someone while they’re bathing sounds familiar, it’s because it was known in antiquity as a situation in which a person would be unarmed, unarmored, and generally vulnerable. In the Odyssey Agamemnon admits, when Odysseus meets his ghost in the underworld, that he was killed when his wife implemented a similar scheme. The Roman emperor Commodus also was assassinated while bathing, despite what the film Gladiator might have reported.)

      This is an unpleasant saga to deal with. Minos is not just a character who undertakes a lot of violent action himself, but also motivates others around him to violence. Women kill for the sake of Minos’ sexual attention--the Athenian princess kills her father, while Minos’ wife kills her rivals. Daedalus, a nominal hero of the story, whose specialty is in the ostensibly non-violent field of engineering, builds the Labyrinth for the purpose of killing young Athenians, and Minos punishes him when the Labyrinth isn’t deadly enough. When Daedalus builds wings to escape from Minos, his son dies by misusing the wings--perhaps not Daedalus’ fault, but nevertheless a death that can be traced back to him. When he finds a new apprentice, he becomes so jealous of the apprentice’s ingenuity that he hurls him to his death. Finally, the wake of blood Minos leaves behind him is cut off by some young girls who are convinced that the only way to stop Minos is to lure him into a false sense of security and then murder him. For all of these desperate, persecuted characters, violence is the only means they can find to prevent more violence, in a world that grows daily more dangerous and uncontrolled.