Marathonian Bull

The Marathonian Bull began its life as a divine gift. When Minos asked Poseidon, the god of the sea and earthquakes, to send a sign from the ocean as proof of his right to rule Crete, the god sent a magnificent white bull that rose from the waves. Minos was crowned king, but he broke his promise to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon. Instead he kept it for his own herds and offered a lesser animal on the altar. Poseidon, enraged by this broken vow, did not strike Minos directly. He cursed Pasiphae, the queen of Crete and daughter of the sun god Helios, with an irresistible passion for the white bull. She turned to Daedalus, the master craftsman, who built a hollow wooden cow so lifelike that it deceived the bull itself, and from this union the Minotaur was born, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The bull that had been a sign of divine favour had become the father of a monster.

But the bull's own story did not end there. After the birth of the Minotaur, the beast went mad. Whether driven by Poseidon's lingering curse or by the unnatural circumstances of its mating, it turned from a splendid animal into a terror. It rampaged across Crete, goring herdsmen, trampling fields, and destroying everything in its path. No hunter dared approach it, and no fence could hold it. Eventually it swam across the Aegean Sea, the sea between Greece and the coast of Asia Minor, and came to the plain of Marathon, a broad coastal flatland northeast of Athens. There it continued its rampage, destroying the farms and villages that dotted the plain, killing anyone who tried to stop it, and becoming the most feared creature in Attica.

The bull's capture became the seventh labour of Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours by King Eurystheus of Mycenae. Eurystheus sent Heracles to Crete to fetch the beast, and the king of Crete, grateful for the offer of help, told Heracles he could take the bull if he could capture it alive. Heracles found the bull on the plain of Marathon, where it had returned after its swim, and wrestled it to the ground with his bare hands, a feat of strength that demonstrated his superhuman power. He bound the bull and carried it across the sea to Mycenae, where he presented it to Eurystheus. But Eurystheus, terrified of the beast and perhaps unwilling to keep a monster that had defied a god, released it. The bull wandered back to the plain of Marathon and resumed its terror.

Years later, Theseus, the prince of Athens who had been raised in Troezen and was travelling to claim his birthright, passed through the plain of Marathon on his way to the city. He found the bull still ravaging the countryside, and he determined to end its threat. Some say he wrestled it as Heracles had done, while others say he used his sword. Either way, he overpowered the beast and led it alive to Athens, where he sacrificed it to Apollo, the god of prophecy and music, or to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and craft who was patron of the city. The bull's death ended the terror of Marathon, and Theseus continued on to Athens, where he would soon volunteer to face the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Crete, the very monster that this bull had fathered.

The plain of Marathon would later become famous for another battle, the defeat of the Persian army in 490 BCE, but in myth it was first known as the grazing ground of Poseidon's bull. The beast's story is a thread that connects the greatest heroes of Greece: the king who broke his vow, the craftsman who built the cow, the queen who loved the beast, the hero who captured it, and the prince who killed it. Every white bull that charges across a field, every monster born of a broken promise, and every plain that remembers a hero's victory carries the memory of the Marathonian Bull, the divine gift that became a divine curse.