“Club that killed my brother, the Minotaur, condemn me too!” Let me note for this honorable court that the monster has been recognized as a brother by another human being.
“My brother, the Minotaur,” let us remember that.
“He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human,” said the gentle and all-knowing Apollodorus (or Pseudo-Apollodorus) at some point during the second century B.C. I believe he’s the only one who didn’t use disparaging epithets against our client.
What does cunning Plutarch do? So as not to sin through his own words, he prefers to speak of the Minotaur through the mouth of Euripides. The latter called him: “A mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape.” And also: “Two different natures, man and bull, were joined in him.” This second statement sounds relatively neutral, which in our case can be taken as compassionate, thus the Minotaur’s human nature can again be seen here.
Unlike him, Seneca, practically an age-mate of Christ, uses language in his Phaedra that would make even Roman soldiers blush. Wretched whore, Hippolytus screams at Phaedra, you’ve outdone even your mother Pasiphaë, who gave birth to a monster, displaying her wild lust to all. But why should I be surprised, you were carried in the same womb where that two-shaped infamy sloshed around . . . It went something like that, to use the jargon of the time.
Does the prosecution object? If it is because of the language, let me note that the words are not mine, while the translation is quite precise. It has nothing to do with our case? You’re mistaken. We’re talking about the abandonment and forcible confinement of a child, branded by his origins, for which he is not to blame. This is followed by slander, abasement, and the public circulation of lies . . . Yet it can be seen, albeit between the lines, in casual suggestions and hints, that the Minotaur’s human nature has been recognized. Despite the fact that his human rights have been taken away. I ask that this be duly noted, your honor, and that you allow me to continue.
The poet Virgil, that favorite of Augustus, sideswipes the victim in passing with the following two lines: “the Minotaur, hybrid offspring, that mixture of species, proof of unnatural relations . . .”
His every word drips with revulsion.
Speaking of Virgil, we can’t help but mention Dante. In The Inferno, the Minotaur is placed at the entrance to the seventh, bloodiest circle: “on the border of the broken bank / was stretched at length the Infamy of Crete.” Dante is even more merciless than his guide, Virgil. After being exiled to the labyrinth, after dying under Theseus’ sword, our defendant was tossed in among the bloodsuckers, tyrants, and those who have sinned against the laws of nature. But isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?
(By the way, that seventh circle was guarded by centaurs. The centaur, with its animal hindquarters and human torso is the mirror image of the Minotaur.)
If literature constantly returns to the Minotaur’s monstrous birth, then visual art is hypnotized by his death. In all the ancient images we have, in all the frescoes, vase-paintings and illustrations of myths and legends, the scene is one and the same—Theseus kills the Minotaur. He is about to be stabbed or is already dead, Theseus dragging him by the horns. Put together, it looks like a series of techniques for close-quarters combat with a sword.
Theseus grasps the Minotaur by one horn and jabs at his chest with the double-edged sword.
The Minotaur has laid his unnaturally large head in Theseus’s lap, exposing his neck to the sword’s blow.
Theseus is behind the Minotaur’s back, holding his neck with his left hand, while driving his short sword somewhere into the soft tissue beneath the rib cage with his right. The body is human. You’re killing a human being, Theseus. The sword goes in smoothly. Yes, in all these scenes the supposedly terrifying body of the Minotaur is vulnerable, there’s no hiding this fact.
On the bottom of one of the kylixes, those shallow glasses for wine, the Minotaur is even beautiful, he looks more like a Moor, with sensual lips and handsome nostrils, he is kneeling, imprudently exposing his body to Theseus’s sword, while the latter’s right foot steps upon the Minotaur’s groin.
In several preserved frescoes on wine vessels we see Theseus dragging behind him the Minotaur’s mild-mannered corpse . . . He scarcely defended himself, as the other lawyer-by-correspondence in the case, Mr. Jorge, shall also testify.
In some of the scenes the murder is even more brutal, harsher, and more barbarian—committed with a heavy staff, a gnarled wooden mace, a crude prototype of today’s bat. The murder of an ox or bull, as they still do it in the village slaughterhouses, is a blow with the butt-end of an axe to the forehead.
Only childhood and death. And nothing in between. Except darkness and silence.
Ladies and gentlemen, I beg that all this be taken into consideration.
VIRUSES
Billy goats and lilies courted all around me
I cried out afeared—Dear Lord have mercy!
Such a sin simply cannot be.
God’s right hand He placed in between.
O, world, from a second Sodom ye are redeemed!
—Gaustine of Arles, seventeenth century
A few words about Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship, which made possible that which nature had forbidden. He crafted a wooden cow, covered it in real cowhide and stuffed Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, who was crazed with lust for the bull, into its empty womb. He put the cow on wheels and took it to the meadow where the bull normally grazed. What happened next is clear. “The bull came up and had intercourse with it, as if with a real cow. Pasiphaë gave birth to Asterios, who was called Minotauros,” as Pseudo-Apollodorus tells it.
However, the myth keeps mum about another hidden consequence. Could the Trojan Horse have been born from the Cretan wooden cow? Again hollow, on wheels, but quite a bit larger, fitting a whole thirty armed soldiers in its womb—not to seduce, but to subjugate. A cow giving birth to a horse, a woman giving birth to a man-bull—Daedalus slips a Trojan horse into the history of species. And a few millennia later, yet another new heir will crop up, without a wooden body, without any body at all—the Trojan horse, a malicious computer virus. It pretends to be a useful program, lies low for a day or two before unleashing its fury—erasing files, opening doors, smashing defenses, letting foreign eyes into your virtual Troy. And all of that—born of Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship. Which goes against the natural order that the mysterious Gaustine from the seventeenth century insisted upon.
There is Order here and God makes no mistake,
Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.
MYTH AND GAME
Shall we talk about the Minotaur and videogames? Just enter any one of the games that have multiplied in recent years. Clichés and classics. The Minotaur looks like your average B-movie thug. Short-legged and beefy, with a short, thick neck, hairy, with the terminator’s trapezoidal face and absurd little horns. And sometimes, as an added bonus, a crooked boar’s tusk. As if the rest wasn’t enough, they had to go and cross the bull with feral pig.
My dearest Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch,
