In Minôs Greek. In Greek mythology, king de Crète, son of Zeus and Europe.

According to Homère (Iliade), Minos is the son of Zeus, the father of Deucalion and the grandfather of the Idoménée hero, who fights at the side of the Achaens during the Trojan War. Minos has two brothers, Sarpédon and Rhadamante, to which it disputes the throne of Crete. In order to draw aside them, Minos shows its rights by ensuring that the gods will grant the first prayer that it will make them. He asks Poséidon to make spout out floods a bull, which he commits himself sacrificing to him at once. A bull leaves the sea then, but it is so beautiful that Minos decides to keep it for him and sacrifices another of them to the god.

To be avenged for the affront which Minos made him while refusing to sacrifice to him the bull spouts out floods, Poséidon inspires in Pasiphaé, the wife of Minos, an immoderate love for the animal - according to another version, it is because Pasiphaé forgot a sacrifice with Artémis which the goddess causes this love against nature. The queen entrusts to Dédale, famous inventive of machines automats which took refuge at the court of Minos. It builds a mobile cow then. Pasiphaé slips into the back legs of the automat and approaches the bull which, allures, links itself with it. From this monstrous union is born Minotaure. The bull is then captured by Héraclès, which carries out it in Greece, where it will be killed by Thésée in the plain of Marathon.

Minos, which seeks to dissimulate the scandal, requires of Dédale to build a palate in which nobody will be able to never penetrate without losing himself and where Minotaure will be locked up. Maze builds then celebrates it Labyrinthe, in which it itself will be locked up with his Icare son to have helped Pasiphaé to allure the bull - according to Ovide (Metamorphoses), Minos does not lock up Dédale but this one, wishing to regain Greece, seeks to flee. At this point in time seat the episode of the escape from Maze and Icare takes.

Minos and Pasiphaé have many children, in particular the Androgée boys, Deucalion and Glaucos, and the girls Acacallis, ARIANE and Phèdre. Glaucos having disappeared, the oracle of Delphes called to Minos that the child would be found by that which would give the best description of a wonder which was held in Crete - where a cow changed color three times per day. The Polyidos soothsayer summarizes the event by affirming that the heifer is similar to a blackberry, initially white, then red and finally black. At once, Minos charges it with leaving in search of Glaucos, which it finds drowned in a honey earthenware jar. Minos then makes lock up the soothsayer in a tomb with the body of his/her son and a sword, and asks him to resurrect it dead. With the sword, Polyidos kills a snake; but soon another snake arrives, which resurrects the first by depositing on him a certain grass. Polyidos seizes then grass and the installation in its turn on the corpse Glaucos, which returns to the life. Minos thanks the soothsayer, and still requires to him that he teaches in Glaucos the art of the divination, which Polyidos does unwillingly. At the time to leave the court of Minos, Polyidos requires of Glaucos to spit to him in the mouth; at once, the young man forgets all that he learned.

As Minos is an inaccurate husband, Pasiphaé condemns it by magic: as soon as it is coupled with another woman, its sperm is replaced by scorpions, snakes and millepede. It is Procris, one of the girls of king d' Athènes, Érechthée, but also the inaccurate wife of Céphale, which, allured by Minos, delivers it magic spell thrown by Pasiphaé. It obtains in exchange a magic javelin, which reach with each blow its target, and a gun dog which always catches game with the attack of which it is launched.

Eager to be avenged for Maze, Minos leaves to its research. Thanks to a stratagem, he manages to find it, in Sicily: knowing that Dédale is most skilful of the inventors, Minos requires everywhere where it stops if somebody is able to make pass a wire through the shell of a snail. King Cocalos, to the court of which Dédale hides, submits the enigma to Dédale, which arrives to its goal by hanging a wire to an ant, that it introduces into the shell and that it attracts towards the bottom by a small coated honey hole. Maze is then discovered, but Minos, before to have been able to be avenged, dies scalded by the girls of king Cocalos, come using Dédale.

Minos becomes judge with the Hells then, at the side of his/her Rhadamanthe brother and Éaque. For certain authors, Minos which married Pasiphaé and to which is thus attached the legend of Minotaure would be the son of the judge of the Hells. Certain modern researchers see in his name the title of the king-priests of Cnossos.

King Minos gave his name to Cretan civilization (Minoan civilization). He symbolizes the economic power and policy of this island, which dominated the Eastern Mediterranean basin during all the II ^E thousand-year-old front J. - C. the labyrinth built by Dédale for Minos undoubtedly evokes the Minoan palates, whose luxury and complexity retained forever any person who penetrated there. When Thésée, the king of the Attic, came in Cnossos to kill Minotaure, symbol of Cretan supremacy and the divine and theocratic character of this kingdom, its victory marked the end of Minoan hegemony and thus the death of Minos. This one reappears however on several occasions like divinity during Greek Antiquity, always related on Aphrodite and the Eastern gods.