Apollodorus, Library and Epitome (ed. Sir James George Frazer)

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[4]  But angry at him for not sacrificing the bull, Poseidon made the animal savage, and contrived that Pasiphae should conceive a passion for it.¹ In her love for the bull she found an accomplice in Daedalus, an architect, who had been banished from Athens for murder.² He constructed a wooden cow on wheels, took it, hollowed it out in the inside, sewed it up in the hide of a cow which he had skinned, and set it in the meadow in which the bull used to graze. Then he introduced Pasiphae into it; and the bull came and coupled with it, as if it were a real cow. And she gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human; and Minos, in compliance with certain oracles, shut him up and guarded him in the Labyrinth. Now the Labyrinth which Daedalus constructed was a chamber “ that [p. 307] with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way. ”³ The story of the Minotaur, and Androgeus, and Phaedra, and Ariadne, I will tell hereafter in my account of Theseus.⁴

¹ Here Apollodorus seems to be following Euripides, who in a fragment of his drama, The Cretans, introduces Pasiphae excusing herself on the ground that her passion for the bull was a form of madness inflicted on her by Poseidon as a punishment for the impiety of her husband Minos, who had broken his vow by not sacrificing the bull to the sea-god. See W. Schubart und U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Griechische Dichterfragmente, ii. (Berlin, 1907), pp. 74ff.

² See below, Apollod. 3.15.8.

³ In the Greek original these words are seemingly a quotation from a poem, probably a tragedy--perhaps Sophocles's tragedy Daedalus, of which a few fragments survive. See TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 167ff.; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, vol. i. pp. 110ff. As to the Minotaur and the labyrinth, compare Diod. 4.77.1-5; Plut. Thes. 15ff.; Hyginus, Fab. 40; Lactantius Placidus on Statius, Achill. 192. As to the loves of Pasiphae and the bull, see also Scholiast on Eur. Hipp. 887; Tzetzes, Chiliades i.479ff.; Verg. Ecl. 6.45ff.; Ovid, Ars Am. i.289ff.

⁴ See below, Apollod. 3.15.7-9; Apollod. E.1.7-11.

Cross references from Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898):
europa [Eurōpa]

This text is based on the following book(s):
Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Includes Frazer's notes.
OCLC: 28280131
ISBN: 0674991354, 0674991362

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