Heracles and the Cretan Bull
Heracles Stop 5 of 9
In brief
- For his seventh labor, Heracles was sent to capture the Cretan Bull, a magnificent but destructive beast rampaging across the island.
- The bull was the same animal once sent by Poseidon to King Minos, and, by some accounts, the father of the Minotaur himself.
- Heracles wrestled the bull into submission with his bare hands and carried it alive all the way back to Greece.
Long before it terrorized Crete, the bull had been a gift from Poseidon to King Minos, sent up from the sea as a sign of the god's favor, on the condition that Minos sacrifice it in return. Minos, taken by the bull's beauty, sacrificed a lesser animal in its place and kept the magnificent creature for himself: a decision that would have grim consequences, since it was this same bull's unnatural union with Minos's wife that was said to have produced the Minotaur.
Poseidon, angered by the broken promise, drove the bull mad, and it rampaged freely across Crete, trampling crops, flattening walls, and terrorizing the countryside with none able to control it.
For his seventh labor, Heracles was sent to capture the beast alive and bring it back to King Eurystheus in Greece. Unlike the poisonous Hydra or the elusive Stymphalian birds, the Cretan Bull could be met head-on: Heracles wrestled it to the ground with his bare hands, choking it into exhausted submission.
With the bull subdued, Heracles hauled it bodily across the sea and delivered it to Eurystheus, who, as with several of Heracles's trophies, wanted nothing to do with the dangerous animal and released it. Freed once more, the bull wandered into the countryside near Marathon, where it would later be hunted down again, this time by the hero Theseus.
