Minotaur

Minotaur, one of the most repulsive conceptions of Greek Mythology, the offspring of Pasiphaë and a bull, for which she had conceived a passion, gratified through the contrivance of Poseidon. The queen placed herself in an artificial cow made by Dædalus, and so became the mother of the monster, half-man half-bull, a man with a bull's head. Minos, the husband of Pasiphaë, shut him up in the Cnossian Labyrinth, and there fed him with the seven youths and seven maidens, whom Athens was obliged to supply at fixed periods as a tribute, till Theseus, with the help of Ariadne (q.v.), slew the monster.