Androgeus

Androgeus was born in the palace at Knossos, the great labyrinthine complex that was the centre of Minoan power, to King Minos and Queen Pasiphae. His brothers and sisters included Ariadne, the princess who would later give Theseus the thread that guided him through the Labyrinth, Phaedra, who would marry Theseus and fall in love with his son Hippolytus, Catreus, Deucalion, and Glaucus. He also had a monstrous half-brother, the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, born from Pasiphae's cursed union with a white bull sent by Poseidon. Androgeus grew up in the most powerful court in the Aegean, the sea between Greece and the coast of Asia Minor, trained in the arts of war, sport, and kingship. He was handsome, strong, and gifted, the pride of his father's house and the heir to a kingdom that dominated the seas.

When Androgeus came of age, he travelled to Athens to compete in the great games held in honour of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and craft who was patron of the city. The Panathenaic games were the most prestigious athletic contest in Attica, the region around Athens, and victors were celebrated as heroes. Androgeus won every event he entered, defeating the best athletes of Athens with ease. His victories were so complete and so humiliating that they aroused the jealousy of the Athenian king Aegeus, who feared that this Cretan prince might become too popular among his own people. In some accounts, Aegeus sent Androgeus against the Marathonian Bull, the white beast that had been sent by Poseidon to Minos and had since gone mad and was ravaging the plain of Marathon near Athens. In other accounts, the Athenians themselves, enraged by his victories, ambushed and killed him on the road. Either way, the prince of Crete died on Attic soil, and his body was carried back to Knossos in grief.

Minos, when he learned of his son's death, was consumed by rage. He gathered his fleet, the most powerful navy in the Aegean, and attacked Athens. The city could not withstand the Cretan forces, and Minos laid siege until the Athenians were forced to surrender. Rather than destroying the city outright, Minos imposed a terrible tribute. Every nine years, Athens would send seven young men and seven young women to Crete, where they would be cast into the Labyrinth, the vast maze built by Daedalus, the master craftsman, beneath the palace at Knossos, and devoured by the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Pasiphae and the divine bull. This tribute continued for two cycles, twenty-seven years of terror, until the third group arrived and among them was Theseus, the prince of Athens who volunteered to go and killed the Minotaur, ending the tribute forever.

Androgeus's death also had consequences in Crete. In some traditions, his sons became the ancestors of the Cretan nobility, or his ghost was said to haunt the shores of Attica. The Athenians later worshipped him as a hero, building a shrine to him in the city, a remarkable act for the people who had caused his death. His tomb was shown in Attica, and sacrifices were made to him as a chthonic deity, a god of the underworld who had the power to bless or curse the land. The prince who had died a victim became, in death, a power that the Athenians sought to appease. His story was a reminder that the greatest athletic victories could provoke the deadliest envy, and that a single murder could chain two kingdoms together in a cycle of terror that only a hero could break.