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.
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