So, in the past I’ve talked about how the Minotaur came to be, as well as Theseus’s part in the dumbest plan to find a wife ever conceived. Today, I’m going to bring those two together and tell you about how Theseus killed the Minotaur.

So, King Minos of Crete has Daedalus build a giant labyrinth and puts the Minotaur into it. Things are going pretty well with this plan: Minos doesn’t have to look at the evidence of his wife Pasiphae’s bestiality on a daily basis, plus he now has a convenient way to get rid of people he doesn’t like. Everything’s coming up Minos!

Then his son, Androgeus, dies during a race in Athens, killed by the very bull that boinked his mom. Minos is pretty upset about that, and kinda blames Aegeus, the king of Athen’s and Theseus’s dad. So he demands that Aegeus send seven Athenians to Crete every year to be fed to the Minotaur.

Aegeus, for some reason, goes along with this for three years. The third year, Theseus decides to volunteer as tribute because he really, really wants to try his hand at killing the Minotaur. He actually tells Minos this, and Minos reacts with, “Yeah, I’d love to see you try.” He also takes some comfort in the fact that, even if Theseus succeeds in killing the monster, he won’t be able to make it out of the giant maze it’s housed in.

There’s one thing Minos didn’t count on, though: the fact that his daughter, Ariadne, would very much like to ride Theseus like a stallion. Because of this, she gives him a spool of thread, and tells him to unspool it as he goes so he can find his way back out again.

He does, and it leads him right back out of the labyrinth after he’s managed to kill the Minotaur. After this, he leaves Crete with Ariadne, presumably giving Minos the finger with both hands.

Some time later, Theseus and his crew decide to stop at an island called Naxos for a bit of a well-deserved party. After they’ve finished partying, Theseus thinks for a bit about Ariadne, who he promised to marry. See, Ariadne betrayed her dad, so she naturally can’t be trusted. So he decides to leave her there.

To be fair, in another version of the story, he leaves her there accidentally and is pretty broken up about it. Neither version makes him look very good. Either way, Ariadne does have a happy ending: she gets married to Dionysus and gets to be a goddess. So that’s cool.

Anyway, they continue on, with Aegeus waiting for his son’s ship to return. Now, Theseus had set up a couple signals for his dad: if the ship’s sails are white, that means everything’s OK and he’s not dead. But if they’re black, well, it means the Minotaur killed him. Small problem, though: Theseus forgot to change out the sails, so when Aegeus sees the ship, he assumes Thesesus is dead. This results in Aegeus throwing himself into what is now known as the Aegean Sea and drowning.

Between this and the whole kidnapping Persephone debacle, I’m starting to think Theseus may not be very bright.