Reconstruction Of The Clothes Of Women From The Minoan Era In Crete (reconstructions Made By Dr. Bernice

From Head of Medusa (1617-1618) by Peter Paul Rubens

the girl with a pomegranate (1875)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain?

A pair of gold bracelets... snacelets. Roman, 1st century AD

from The Walters Art Museum

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

The Minotaur in the Labyrinth

The Minotaur in the Labyrinth stands as one of the ancient stories that has survived the test of time and continuously appears in mainstream entertainment. Most understand that this concept began with the story of Theseus of ancient Athens and how he navigated the labyrinth and slayed the beast within, but many don’t know the inspiration of this idea.

Nearly a millennia before Classical Greece rose to the height of its power (500-350 BCE) the two leading cultures of the Aegean Sea were the Mycenaeans on the mainland and the Minoans on modern day Crete, and it is on this island that we find the labyrinthian structures of Bronze age Greece.

The Bronze Age Palace at Knossos: Plan and Sections by British archaeologist Sinclair Hood and Canadian archaeologist William E, Taylor, Jr., was published as Supplementary Volume No. 13 of The British School at Athens in 1981. It shows the archaeological remains of one of the many Minoan Palaces. Though mostly destroyed and crumbling, we can still see the complex layout of halls and rooms that twist, turn, and abruptly end. Beginning with the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans in 1900, scores of theories have been raised about the purpose of such confounding architecture, from a form of defense to a means of controlling foreign visits.  

Besides the confusing architecture, though no depictions of minotaurs were found, Minoan Palaces such as the one at Knossos did contained several pieces of art that depicted bulls. Upon further inspection, the symbol of the Bull was quite prominent throughout the ancient culture from sports, such as bull leaping, to religious sacrifice.

When looking to those who lived in the past, one should remember that we are not the only ones who inquired about archaeological remains. These ruins would’ve been seen by the Classical Greeks, but by that time their imaginations about the great Palaces and Bull iconography of the Minoan civilization was transformed into the myth of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.

View more posts on Ancient Greece.

– LauraJean, Special Collections Undergraduate Classics Intern

AND IF we’re talking about Ovid’s take on the Persephone myth anyway, and the other story Ovid inserted, the comparison between the boy being turned into a lizard for laughing at Demeter and the Demophon myth are so different in every single aspect that I cannot fathom what the use of the second one is to the Persephone myth, only to Ovid’s overall themes. While Demophon is a temporary stand-in for Persephone and perhaps even a tool Demeter uses to one-up her brothers, and is a cultic display of her matronly side as a goddess, the lizard tale just…provides comedy? Characterizes her as petty or fickle? It really is the most derailing story line in this part of the text, as Demeter is searching before it and after it. It only provides the mandatory metamorphosis, but so does Cyane? And the fun part is that the episode reflects the Homeric hymn in that Demeter is received as a guest and receives a specific type of food tied to her role as goddess of the grain, but here it has absolutely no payoff, nor any ambiguity to make us guess at more. It just…is. 

James Baldwin talking about love

Persephone the Wanderer (II)

by Louise Glück

In the second version, Persephone is dead. She dies, her mother grieves– problems of sexuality need not trouble us here. Compulsively, in grief, Demeter circles the earth. We don’t expect to know what Persephone is doing. She is dead, the dead are mysteries. We have here a mother and a cipher: this is accurate to the experience of the mother as she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks: I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant is puzzled: later, the child’s opinion is she has always existed, just as her mother had always existed in her present form. Her mother is like a figure at a bus stop, an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that, she was the bus, a temporary home or convenience. Persephone, protected, stares out of the window of the chariot. What does she see? A morning in early spring, in April. Now her whole life is beginning–unfortunately, it’s going to be a short life. She’s going to know, really, only two adults: death and her mother. But two is twice what her mother has: her mother has one child, a daughter. As a god, she could have had a thousand children. We begin to see here the deep violence of the earth whose hostility suggests she has no wish to continue as a source of life. And why is this hypothesis never discussed? Because it is not in the story; it only creates the story. In grief, after the daughter dies, the mother wanders the earth. She is preparing her case; like a politician she remembers everything and admits nothing. For example, her daughter’s birth was unbearable, her beauty was unbearable: she remembers this. She remembers Persephone’s innocence, her tenderness– What is she planning, seeking her daughter? She is issuing a warning whose implicit message is: what are you doing outside my body? You ask yourself: why is the mother’s body safe? The answer is this is the wrong question, since the daughter’s body doesn’t exist, except as a branch of the the mother’s body that needs to be reattached any any cost. When a god grieves it meas destroying others (as in war) while at the same time petitioning to reverse agreements (as in war also): if Zeus will get her back, winter will end. Winter will end, spring will return. The small pestering breezes that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers– Spring will return, a dream based on a falsehood: that the dead return. Persephone was used to death. Now over and over her mother hauls her out again– You must ask yourself: are the flowers real? If Persephone “returns” there will be one of two reasons: either she was not dead or she is being used to support a fiction– I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth? And he would say, in a short time you will be here again. And in the time between you will forget everything: those fields of ice will be the meadows of Elysium.