In due course Pasiphae, the bull’s seed inside her, gave birth. What emerged was—as might be expected and thoroughly deserved—a monstrous aberration, half human and half bull. Minos was disgusted but neither he nor Pasiphae had the heart or stomach to kill the abomination. Instead, Minos commissioned Daedalus to construct a building in which this creature—which they named Asterion after Minos’s father, but which the world called the MINOTAUR—could be safely housed and from which it could never escape.
