The Minotaur is a mythological being born in the island of Crete from the mating of Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, and Poseidon’s sacred bull. To hide the monstrous product of his adultery, described by Ovid as “the infamy of the family,” (“opprobrium generis,” Met. VIII, 155-156), Minos walled him up in a labyrinth built by the architect Daedalus, where he feasts on human flesh. He is killed by Theseus of Athens who managed to find his way through the labyrinth thanks to Ariadne’s thread.
The myth of the Minotaur is reported by many mythographers: among the Latins, see Hygyn, Fables, 40; Mythography of the Vatican I, 43; Mythography of the Vatican II, 126; Mythography of the Vatican III, 11, 7; or see comments of Lactantius Placidus in Ach. I, 192, and of Servius in Aen. VI, 24. The allusions to this monster by classical poets are also frequent. Dante was probably inspired by Virgil’s representation for his Minotaur (Buc. VI, 46 ff. and Aen. VI, 25-26 “Mixtumque genus prolesque biformis / Minotaurus… Veneris monumenta nefandae”; Ovid, Met. VIII, 152 ff.).
In Dante’s Inferno, the monster lies on the rocky outcrop that marks the entrance to the seventh circle. As the two pilgrims approach, he bites himself “like someone ruled by wrath” (Inf. 12, 15). Seeking to reassure the monster, Virgil certifies him that the newcomer is not Theseus. The name of its murderer enrages the monster even more and, in prey to the madness, it moves so as to clear the way for the two travelers; the way being free, they pass quietly (v. 11-30). The episode raises two issues. The first one concerns the way in which the monster is represented by Dante, i.e., lying on the “jagged edge” (v. 11), animated by a blind movement which recalls that of a bull “that breaks its tether / just as it receives the mortal blow” (v 22-23, inspired from Aen. II, 223-224). These images suggest that Dante imagines the Minotaur as a bull with a human head, similar to the other demons that guard the violent, namely centaurs and harpies. Indeed, although archaeological artifacts confirm that the ancients conceived the Minotaur as a man with a bull’s head, some literary sources, known by Dante, carry ambiguous indications (notably Ovid, Ars Am. II, 24, “Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem”) that medieval documents and commentators of the Comedy in the fourteenth century have interpreted in one way or the other. Nevertheless, the most common representation of the Minotaur depicts him with the head of a bull and the body of a man. On the other hand, the evidence offered by Dante’s text are not incontestable, and the comparison with the bull does not necessarily refer to a bullfighting body. Virgil, in the Aeneid, makes a similar analogy concerning the body, entirely anthropomorphic, of Laocoon.
The ambiguity around the appearance of the Minotaur leads to a second problem, this time concerning the function assigned to him by Dante in the moral topography of Inferno. Since we are not certain if the poet attributes a physical structure to the Minotaur that is similar to the other guardians of the seventh circle, the relationship between the creature and the sin of violence remains undefined.
Consult the entry of the Enciclopedia Dantesca in Italian.
Entry taken from the Enciclopedia Dantesca published by the Istituto Treccani — Texts revised by the Centre d’études médiévales of the Université de Montréal.
Editing: Gabrielle Hamelin, Martyna Kander.
English translation: Brittany Buscio.