In the story of the labyrinth Hellenes told, the Athenian hero Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's thread.

By extension, in popular legend the palace is associated with the myth of the Minotaur.

* In the 2010 video game, God of War III ( which is loosely based on Greek mythology ), Daedalus and the Labyrinth are featured but instead of the Labyrinth imprisoning the Minotaur, it imprisons Pandora.

The Minotaur is commonly represented in Classical art with the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull.

The Minotaur is also the first infernal guardian whom Virgil and Dante come across within the walls of Dis ( the fallen angels, Erinyes, and the unseen Medusa were located on the city's defensive ramparts in Canto IX ).

The Minotaur seems to represent the entire zone of Violence similar to how Geryon represents Fraud in Canto XVI, and holds a similar role in that he is the gatekeeper for the entire seventh Circle.

Whereas Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his own commentary compares the Minotaur with all three sins of violence within the seventh circle: " The Minotaur, who is situated at the rim of the tripartite circle, fed, according to the poem was biting himself ( violence against oneself ) and was conceived in the ' false cow ' ( violence against nature, daughter of God ).

This unusual association of the Minotaur with Centaurs, not made in any Classical source, is shown visually in William Blake's rendering of the Minotaur ( illustration ) as a kind of taurine centaur himself.

On the Athenian stage Minos is a cruel tyrant, the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed to the Minotaur.

A young Minotaur is depicted on a seal from Knossos.

Theseus is played by Bob Mathias in the 1960 film Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete, and by Tom Hardy in the 2006 film Minotaur.

It is because of explosive hazard that the higher energy military solid propellants containing HMX are not used in commercial launch vehicles except when the LV is an adapted ballistic missile already containing HMX propellant ( Minotaur IV and V based on the retired Peacekeeper ICBMs ).

She is mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths, due to her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus.

Kerenyi observes that her name is merely an epithet and claims that she was originally the " Mistress of the Labyrinth ", both a winding dance-ground and in the Greek view a prison with the dreaded Minotaur at its centre.

410 BCE ) Theseus drags the Minotaur from a temple-like labyrinth, but the goddess who attends him, in this Attic representation, is Athena.

* The Minotaur myth is referenced repeatedly as a metaphor over the course of the trilogy The Golden Age, culminating at the end with a newly " born " machine-mind adopting Ariadne as her name.

Vandenberg AFB is a Department of Defense space and missile testing base, with a mission of placing satellites into polar orbit from the West Coast, using expendable boosters ( Pegasus, Taurus, Minotaur, Atlas V and Delta IV ).

It has been proposed that Morax is related to the Minotaur which Dante places in Hell ( Inferno, Canto xii ).

The third Annual is set during Tim's time in America, and sees him saving a child abuse victim from similar abuse at the hands of the Minotaur, transported to modern day America to hide in a nightclub called The Labyrinth.

They suggested that such descriptions of Moloch might be simply taken from accounts of the sacrifice to Cronus and from the tale of the Minotaur ; They found no evidence of a bull-headed Phoenician god.

In fact, Theseus had overcome and slain the Minotaur, but tragically had simply forgotten about the white sail.

The term Minotaur derives from the Ancient Greek, a compound of the name ( Minos ) and the noun " bull ", translated as "( the ) Bull of Minos ".

In Crete, the Minotaur was known by its proper name, Asterion, a name shared with Minos ' foster-father.

( Asterion referred to as the name of the Minotaur )

* Melanippe, an emendation for " Medippe " ( name of one of the sacrificial victims of Minotaur ) in Servius ' commentaries on Aeneid.

* David Edwards, musician who records under the name Minotaur Shock

Six ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Minotaur after the minotaur, a creature in Greek mythology:

Mozilla Thunderbird was originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix ( the original name for Mozilla Firefox ), the project failed to gain momentum.

With the success of the Mozilla Firefox, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.

Her name means Child of the Minotaur.

Once continental Greece was free from Crete's dominance, the myth of the Minotaur worked to distance the forming religious consciousness of the Hellene poleis from Minoan beliefs.

Above the Venus and in contact with it is a bison head, which has led some to describe the composite drawing as a Minotaur.

Although early Cretan coins occasionally exhibit multicursal patterns, the unicursal seven-course " Classical " design became associated with the Labyrinth on coins as early as 430 BC, and became widely used to represent the Labyrinth – even though both logic and literary descriptions make it clear that the Minotaur was trapped in a complex branching maze.

Icarus's father Daedalus, a talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull.

According to Karl Kerenyi and other scholars, the second Asterion, the star at the center of the labyrinth on Cretan coins, was in fact the Minotaur, as the compiler of Bibliotheca ( III. 1. 4 ) asserts: Pasiphaë gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur.

In Greek mythology, the Cretan Bull was either the bull that carried away Europa or the bull Pasiphaë fell in love with, giving birth to the Minotaur.

The Cretan Bull which fathered the Minotaur was originally calm and sent from Poseidon, but king Minos whom it was sent to fell out of favor with Poseidon, and so in some versions of the story, Poseidon made the bull angry.

Aetiologists connected both offerings with the Cretan expedition of Theseus, who, when driven ashore at Delos, vowed a thank-offering to Apollo if he slew the Minotaur, which afterwards took the form of the eiresin and Pyanopsia.

" — revealing with those words to the reader that Asterion is indeed the Cretan Minotaur.

However, some published versions claim that the word derives from Cretan " knossos " or " gnossus " and link the Gnossiennes to Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur myth.

A cow-headed Hera, like a Minotaur would be at odds with the maternal image of the later classical period.

Often an image of the Minotaur appears in the centre of these mosaic labyrinths.

William Blake's image of the Minotaur to illustrate Inferno XII

Many of them were inscribed with Knosion or Knos on the obverse and an image of a Minotaur or Labyrinth on the reverse, both symbols deriving from the myth of King Minos, supposed to have reigned from Knossos.

Stand Alone Complex character designer Hajime Shimomura said that Batou's image was based on the Minotaur.