The son of the Great Bull of Minos and Queen Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, both made mad in the vengeance of Posiedon, that Minos had refused to fulfill his promise to sacrifce the Great Bull.

The lower half of the Minotaur was human, after his mother Queen Pasiphae, and the upper half of his body was a ferocious Bull after his father the Great Bull. His real name was Asterius or Asterion.

King Minos had commissioned Daedalus, the greatest designer and architect of the Peloponnese, to build a vast labyrinthine palace, an inexplicable maze of three floors of chambers and corridors, in which the Minotaur was kept enclosed.

King Minos possessed the most powerful fleet in the Aegean Sea, and following the death of his legitimate son Androgeos in Athens, he determined to take revenge upon that city by demanding the annual tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be fed to the Minotaur.