Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Minos.
The gallery
Minos (detail from The Last Judgment)
Michelangelo, 1536–1541
Detail from Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel: Minos, judge of the underworld, stands among the damned with ass's ears and a serpent coiled about his body. The Cretan king of myth becomes Dante's infernal magistrate — the face Renaissance Rome gave to eternal judgment.
Minos (Inferno, Canto V)
Gustave Doré, 1861
Wood engraving from Gustave Doré's illustrated Divine Comedy: Minos sits at the gate of Hell, wrapping his tail to assign each soul its circle. Doré's Romantic reading of Dante sealed the Cretan lawgiver as the iconic judge of the damned for the modern age.
Minos and Scylla
Unknown (17th-century etching), 17th century
A 17th-century etching of the Megarian tragedy: Scylla, daughter of Nisus, is drawn to the besieging Cretan king Minos — the fatal infatuation that will cost her father his purple lock and Megara its walls. Minos appears as the remote, dazzling object of a love that Ovid makes disastrous.
Minos
Guillaume Rouillé (Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum), 1553
Woodcut portrait of King Minos from Guillaume Rouillé's Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum (Lyon, 1553). The Renaissance emblem book freezes the Cretan lawgiver and labyrinth-lord as a classical ruler in profile — Minos as one of the emblematic kings of antiquity.
In play
The King Must Die
Mary Renault
Renault's Minos is the dying god-king of Crete — Theseus' path to the labyrinth runs through the palace that bears the judge's name.
Inferno
Dante Alighieri
Dante seats Minos at the gate of Hell as the judge who assigns the damned their circle — the Cretan king turned eternal magistrate.