The Golden Step Read Online Free PDF Page A

said that mighty Zeus, chief among Olympian gods, had been born in their island, in a cave on the slopes of the Lasithi Plain, high in the Dhiktean mountains. His mother Rhea, pregnant with the unborn Zeus, fled from her spouse Kronos (who was also her brother), a God-awful monster begotten of a union between his own brother Uranus, ruler of the world, and their mutual mother Gaea. Kronos had castrated Uranus so that he himself could inherit the world; then, fearing a prophecy that he would be dethroned by his own son, the ogre ate the first five children that he sired on his sister Rhea. This was bad behaviour, even by the standards of the ancient gods.
    In another cave under Mount Ida, Crete’s highest mountain, baby Zeus was nursed by the goat-goddess Amaltheia. When he was grown, Zeus left Crete. He forced Kronos to vomit up his siblings alive and well, and together they succeeded in deposing their bestial father. Zeus became ruler of the heavens, and his two brothers took control of other spheres of Creation – Poseidon the Shaker, god of tempest and earthquake, held sway over the seas, while Hades governed the Underworld. But the chief god often returned to the island of his birth, generally in amorous pursuit of some lovely nymph or human girl. Zeus was immortal in the minds of most Greeks, but Cretans believed that he died and was reborn each year. In a somewhat puzzling twist, they also said that he was buried on the peak of Mount Iouchtas, looking north over the lush country around Iraklion and out across the blue Cretan Sea towards Greece and Mount Olympus.
    On one of Zeus’s visits to Crete he was accompanied by Europa, the beautiful young daughter of the King of Phoenicia. The god was in the form of a white bull, and Europa rode upon his back as he swam to the island. Once on Cretan soil Zeus reassumed his godly shape – or he may have changed himself into an eagle. At all events, somewhere in the south of the island, in the groves around Gortyn on the plain of Mesara, he had his way with his lovely companion. Of the three sons they conceived, one grew to be Minos the ruler, king in Crete, a man that some say was a just and even-handed monarch, others a bloody tyrant. Zeus loved Minos, and returned every nine years to the cave where Rhea had borne him for a conference with his son, patiently teaching him the arts of kingship. Minos had everything a king could wish for, including a complicated and wonderful palace which was built for him at Knossos near the north coast of Crete by the greatest practical genius in the world, the cunning craftsman Daedalus. To set the seal on his satisfaction, Minos’s uncle Poseidon sent him a splendid white bull as a mark of approval. But the gods have a propensity to destroy those who become arrogant; and this gift had disastrous consequences.
    If he had been wiser, or better-mannered, King Minos would have returned Poseidon’s bull to its godly donor in the form of a sacrifice – the ultimate token of respect. But the Cretan king couldn’t bring himself to destroy such a magnificent animal, and made the mistake of offering a lesser beast instead. Poseidon, mortally insulted, cast a spell on Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphae, causing her to fall hotly in love with the bull. The animal, however, showed no interest in her. Pasiphae secretly enlisted the help of Daedalus, who constructed a hollow model cow in which the queen concealed herself. The bull, inflamed by the beauty of the cow, mounted both model and hidden woman simultaneously. The offspring of this tragi-comic union turned out to be a freak, the Minotaur, with the body of a human and the head of a bull, whom King Minos ordered to be incarcerated in the mazy labyrinth of passages and dungeons that Daedalus constructed beneath his palace. Here the monster was fed on batches of youths and maidens shipped in from Athens.
    Brave Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, volunteered to join one of