Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

To Aunt Littlely, beloved

In 1952, when the young cryptographer, Michael Ventris, announced his partial decipherment of the clay tablets found in the ruins of Knossos, archaeologists, linguists, and laymen greeted his announcement with enthusiasm and expectation. Since the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans at the turn of the century, the island of the fabulous Sea Kings had piqued the imagination with its snake-goddesses and bull games, labyrinths and man-killing Minotaurs. But instead of a Cretan Iliad, the tablets revealed a commonplace inventory of palace furniture and foodstuffs, with occasional names of a town, a god, or a goddess. In a word, they confirmed the already accepted facts that the ancient Cretans had lived comfortably, worshiped conscientiously, and kept elaborate records. Those who had hoped for an epic, a tragedy, or a history—in short, for a work of literature to rival the Cretan achievements in architecture and fresco painting—were severely disappointed.

In 1960, however, an American expedition from Florida Midland University excavated a cave on the southern coast of Crete near the ancient town of Phaestus and discovered a long scroll of papyrus, sealed in a copper chest from the depredations of thieves and weather. I myself commanded that expedition and wrote the article which announced our find to the public. At the time of my article, we had barely begun to decipher the scroll, which I prematurely announced to be the world’s earliest novel, the fanciful story of a war between men and monsters. But as we progressed with our decipherment, we marveled at the accurate historical framework, the detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, the painstaking fidelity to fact in costume and custom. We began to ask ourselves: Were we dealing, after all, with a novel, a fabrication, a fantasy? Then, last year, in the same cave, one of my colleagues discovered an intaglio seal ring of lapis lazuli which depicted a field of crocuses, a blue monkey, and a young girl of grave and delicate beauty. The discovery gave us pause: The identical ring had been described in the scroll, and its faithfully-rendered subjects, the monkey and the girl, were both participants in the so-called War of the Beasts.

My colleagues and I are scholars, objective and factual— the least romantic of men. We do not make extravagant claims. We do suggest, however, that our manuscript, instead of the world’s first novel, is one of its first histories, an authentic record of several months in the Late Minoan Period soon after the year 1500 B.C., when the forests of Crete were luxuriant with oak and cedars and ruled by a race who called themselves the Beasts. We realize that the consequences of such a suggestion are breathtaking and may, in time, necessitate a complete reexamination of classical mythology, since many of our so-called “myths” may in fact be sober history. What is more, folklorists may find in the scroll the prototype for a famous fairy tale long believed to have originated in the Middle Ages. Now, with considerable doubts and a rare, unscholarly excitement, we present to you the first English text of the manuscript which we have designated Day of the Minotaur. Wherever possible, proper names have been modernized for the convenience of the layman.

T.I. Montasque, Ph. D., Sc.D., L.L.D.

Florida Midland University,

July 29, 1964.

My history belongs to the princess Thea, niece of the great king Minos, and to her brother Icarus, named for the ill-fated son of Daedalus who drowned in the sea when his glider lost its wings. I, the author, am a poet and craftsman and not a historian, but at least I have studied the histories of Egypt and I will try to imitate their terse, objective style. You must forgive me, however, if now and then I digress and lose myself in the glittering adjectives which come so readily to my race. We have always been rustic poets, and I, the last of the line, retain an ear for the well-turned phrase, the elegant (yes, even the flowery) epithet.

Thea and Icarus were the only children of the Cretan prince, Aeacus, brother to Minos. As a young warrior, Aeacus had led a punitive expedition against a band of pirates who had raided the coast and taken refuge in the great forests of the interior. For three years no one heard of him. Returning at last to Knossos, he brought with him, instead of captured pirates, two small children. His own, he told the court. By whom? By a lady he had met on his wanderings. And where had he wandered? Through the Country of the Beasts, a forest of cypress and cedar shut from the rest of the island by the tall limestone ridges which humped from the range of Ida. Cynics concluded that Thea and Icarus were the offspring of a peasant; romanticists questioned if a mere peasant could have given birth to children as strange as they were beautiful, with neatly pointed ears and hair whose luminous brown held intimations of green. Thea took pains to hide her ears behind a cluster of curls, but she could not hide the color of her hair. Icarus, on the other hand, displayed his ears with a mixture of shyness and pride; he allowed no wisp of hair to cover their tips, though his head was a small meadow of green-glinting curls.

The children grew up in a troubled court. The power of the island kingdom had become a thin crescent of its ancient fullness. Gargantuan earthquakes had damaged the many-palaced cities. The famous fleet, scattered by tidal waves, had fallen into disrepair or come to be manned by mercenaries from Egypt. The bronze robot Talos, guardian of the coast, lay rusting beside the great Green Sea, and no one remembered how to repair him. As the brother of Minos, Aeacus spent most of his time in the royal palace at Knossos, and after Minos’ death he assumed the throne. A wise if somewhat forbidding ruler, he correctly guessed that the barbarous Achaeans, who lived in the rock-built citadels of Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae on the mainland to the north of Crete, were building ships to attack his people. The Achaeans worshiped Zeus of the Lightning and Poseidon, the Thunderer, instead of the Great Mother; their greatest art was war; and their raids on the Cretan coast resembled small invasions, with a dozen eagle-prowed ships descending on a town in the dead of night to steal gold and capture slaves.

Foreseeing the eventual fall of Knossos, Aeacus sent his children—Thea was ten at the time, Icarus nine—to his mansion called Vathypetro, ten miles south of Knossos, a small, fortified, and self-sufficient palace which included a kiln, an olive press, and a weaving shop. Poised on the roof in the arms of a catapult lay one of the gliders devised by the late scientist, Daedalus. In case of siege, Aeacus’ servants had orders to place the children on the fish-like body and strike the bronze trigger which, releasing the catapult, would propel them to relative safety in the heart of the island.

Six years after her arrival in Vathypetro, when invasion had become a certainty instead of a possibility, and the great palace at Mallia had fallen to pirates, Thea was picking crocuses in the North Court. The bright yellow flowers, known to poets as the cloth-of-gold, covered the earth like a rippling fleece, except where a single date-palm broke the flowers with its bending trunk and clustered, succulent fruit. She could hear, in the next court, the sounds of the olive-press, a granite boulder crushing the black kernels, the mush being poured into sacks and pressed under wooden levers weighted with stones. But the workers, the old and the very young who had not been called to the army defending Knossos, did not sound joyful; they did not sing their usual praises to the Great Mother. For want of sufficient pickers, the fruit had been left too long on the trees and its oil was crude and strong.