So couldn’t there be more to the Minotaur story? Isn’t it possible that some kind of dark deeds really were afoot on Crete, something nefarious involving Athenian teenagers who were saved by a “perfect knight”?
As new curator of Knossos, Pendlebury began his own investigation into what really went on down in King Minos’s basement. According to legend, Minos’s son, Androgeos, was a superb athlete who was murdered after winning all the events at the Athenian Games. To avenge his death, Minos forced Athens to send fourteen of its finest young men and women every year to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, the monster born after Minos’s wife had a fling with a magical sea bull. The Athenian teens would be shoved into a labyrinth, where they’d wander in darkness as the Minotaur sniffed them out and devoured them. Until Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to go.
Theseus was clever enough to increase his manpower by persuading two young men to masquerade as girls, but his big break came when he caught the eye of Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Her heart fluttered at the sight of Theseus, so she snuck him a ball of string and whispered some advice: if he tied one end of the string to the entrance, he could follow it back out of the maze if he defeated the Minotaur. How exactly he’d handle the monster’s horns and bone-crushing strength, Theseus had no idea—until they were face-to-face. The instinct of any creature with horns is to thrash its head, so Theseus got behind the Minotaur and onto its back, locking on to the Minotaur’s neck as it raged and flailed and finally choked itself out.
“He presses out the life, the brute’s savage life, and now it lies dead,” Edith Hamilton writes of that epic battle. “Only the head sways slowly, but the horns are useless now.” Theseus followed the string back to the exit and set sail. The trip home was a disaster; Theseus somehow lost Ariadne along the way and caused his father to commit suicide by raising the wrong signal-sail, so his father, waiting on shore, believed Theseus had died. But he brought the Athenian teenagers home, along with a new way they could defend themselves from future monsters: when the Minotaur died, pankration was born.
Could “circus sports,” as old Arthur Evans insisted, really be the basis for such a dramatic and enduring legend? Pendlebury didn’t buy it. Spectacles come and go, but cruelty lasts forever. Only something horrible would linger so long in the collective memory, and Pendlebury believed the hint was right there in the language.
“Names have a habit of being remembered when the deeds with which they are associated are forgotten or garbled,” Pendlebury mused in his masterpiece, The Archeology of Crete. Theseus means “the one who sets things straight,” while Minotaur is “Minos’s bull.” Labyrinth comes from labrys, or “double-edged ax.” Add the children’s bones discovered in the Labyrinth—“chamber of the double-edged ax”—and a scenario like this takes shape: A priest-king who’s been stampeding across Greece like a bull believes his power comes from a magic ceremony, so he uses captured children to represent weaker nations and kills them with his labrys, shaped like a bull’s horns.
“Do we dare believe he wore the mask of a bull?” Pendlebury wonders. Why not? Executioners hood their heads not only to hide their identities, but to split them; to separate who they are from what they have to do. King Minos becomes a monster only when he pulls on the Minotaur mask, and once the slaughter is over, he’s back to being the benevolent ruler again. Until, that is, a crusading hero storms his way into Knossos at the head of a rebel band. Guards and soldiers can’t stop them, but maybe a supernatural ritual can.
“The final scene takes place in the most dramatic room ever excavated—the Throne Room,” Pendlebury writes. “It looks as if the king had been hurried here to undergo too late some last ceremony in the hopes of saving the people. Theseus and the Minotaur!”
Pendlebury got his own taste of the labrys when he published his theory. “His imagination drove his passion for archeology,” biographer Imogen Grundon would explain, but senior archeologists worried that all that passion and imagination were launching Pendlebury right past science and into science fiction. His article became “notorious,” and he was urged, for his own sake, to “tone down his conclusions.” Realistically, the kind of people Pendlebury was relying on to make his case—murderous bull-wizards and swashbuckling kid saviors—simply didn’t exist.
Didn’t—or don’t? “My theory is not fantastic,” Pendlebury fumed. Just because men and women of our era don’t live up to the myths doesn’t mean no one ever has, or ever will again. Pendlebury was digging into a world that few people alive have ever seen, and it was opening his eyes to electrifying possibilities. We’re hardwired by nature to find common social ground, to believe that whatever we’re doing today is normal and not much different from the way people have always behaved. We assume human achievement is on an upward slope, that learning from the past has made us stronger and smarter than anyone of the past.
But if that’s true, then explain Eumastas.
In the sixth century B.C., Eumastas hoisted a stone so huge that no one has lifted its equal in 2,600 years. How did he get air under those 1,058 pounds without the aid of steroids, padded gloves, or gym equipment? Or is the question its own answer: was it because he had to rely on his own body genius and struggle with bumpy boulders, instead of smooth modern steel, that Eumastas learned more than we’ll ever know about leverage, balance, and explosive power?
And if that’s the case, then Pheidippides also makes sense.
In 490 B.C., Pheidippides is believed to have run more than ten consecutive marathons, nonstop, racing up and over mountains for three straight days. He wasn’t one of a kind, either; he was one of a corps. Pheidippides was an hemerodromos, or “all-day runner,” a foot messenger who was faster over rough hills than a horse and tougher in the heat. When Athens was under attack by Persia at the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran 280 miles round-trip to ask Sparta for reinforcements. At the finish, he wasn’t wrapped in a silvery space blanket and handed an orange slice; he still had enough juice to yank his sword and plunge right into the fight. As amazing as that sounds, Pheidippides wasn’t even best of class. “A young boy but nine years old,” Roman historian Plinius Secundus reminds us, “between noon and evening ran 650 stadia”—that’s seventy-five miles—while two other couriers, Lanisis and Philonides, whipped through 144 miles in twenty-four hours: four miles more than Pheidippides’s first leg in twelve fewer hours.
And John Pendlebury was supposed to “tone down his conclusions”? Please. His imagination could barely keep up with the realities he was unearthing from the buried world. Take Homer: he turned out to be right about the places he described, so why not the people? Were his heroes truer to life than we believed? Homer was no fan of perfect golden boys, after all; he was more intrigued by the guy who’s off his game, past his prime, always one step closer to losing than winning.