The monster in the labyrinth had a name: Asterion, meaning star, and he was a prince of Crete. This episode builds a chronological biography of the Minotaur beginning with King Minos’s plea to Poseidon for a sign of divine favor, his refusal to sacrifice the white bull that emerged from the sea, and the curse that drove Queen Pasiphae, daughter of the sun god Helios, into the hollow wooden cow built by Daedalus.

The hosts follow Asterion’s isolated childhood, the labyrinth as a possible alternative to killing family and incurring miasma, the death of his half-brother Androgeus in Athens, and the tribute of seven youths and seven maidens that 19th-century mythologists read as a memory of Minoan economic dominance. They then reexamine Theseus, who needed Ariadne’s thread, abandoned her on Naxos, and forgot to change his black sails, causing his father Aegeus to leap into the sea that now bears his name. The episode closes with Dante placing the Minotaur in the seventh circle of hell, Jorge Luis Borges’s The House of Asterion, Julio Cortazar’s 1949 play The Kings, and Karl Kerenyi’s theory that the star on Knossos coins points to an original Cretan deity.

• Why Ovid’s vague description led some later artists to draw the Minotaur like a centaur
• The Cretan bull at Marathon and the two competing accounts of Androgeus’s death
• How often the tribute was demanded according to different sources
• Borges’s Minotaur waiting for a redeemer rather than fighting his killer
• History written by the victors: how Athens may have downgraded a Cretan star god