The Golden Step Read Online Free PDF

the consignments and try to put an end to the terrible toll of fine young women and men. On arrival in Crete the handsome young prince enlisted the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne. She gave him her heart, along with a ball of wool. Unravelling the wool as he went, Theseus entered the dark labyrinth, confronted and killed the Minotaur, and found his way out again by following the thread. The lovers escaped from Crete together with the other Athenian hostages, but after a night of passion Theseus – not quite as honourable as he was handsome – abandoned Minos’s daughter on the island of Naxos. To punish him, the gods caused him to forget to change the sails of his ship – the agreed signal that his mission had succeeded – and King Aegeus, watching from the cliffs, assumed his beloved son was dead and threw himself to his own death in the sea.
    Back on Crete a furious King Minos was looking around for a scapegoat. Daedalus and his son Icarus fled the wrath of the king by flying away from the island on homemade wings of wax and feathers. High over the sea, Icarus became careless and flew too near the sun. The wax on his wings melted, sending him plummeting into the water. His grief-stricken father flew on to Sicily, where he went into hiding at the court of King Kokalos.
    Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. King Minos, crazed with lust for revenge on Daedalus – the architect, as he saw it, of the whole tragedy – was rash enough to follow him into the foreign island of Sicily. The daughters of King Kokalos attended the maniacal Minos as he took a bath, and there they scalded him to death.

    As a mythic backdrop to an island of strong passions and quick tempers, this bloody and fast-moving tale seems absolutely apt. Poking around the ruins of Zakros Palace that April morning, I thought of the gradual dawning during the 19th century of the realisation that there might be a historical foundation for the Gothic extravagances of these ancient world fables. The Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr, shadowily remembered in Crete as a dashing figure astride a galloping black horse, initiated many digs around the island in the 1880s and ’90s, discovering fragments of towns and dwellings and their artefacts that had lain under the fields and hillside rocks for thousands of years. But it was Arthur Evans’s epic excavation from 1900 onwards of the palace of King Minos at Knossos, focus of the whole splendid old story, that grabbed hold of the public imagination. Whether there had ever really been a King Minos, or a Labyrinth with a bull-headed Minotaur, was beside the point. Evans unearthed a giant complex of dwellings – more like a close-packed town than a royal palace, in fact – with workshops and ceremonial rooms, strongholds and halls, staircases and colonnades, complete with pottery, glassware, domestic fittings, cutlery, tools, jewellery, and beautiful, vividly executed frescoes. There was controversy about some of his methods, particularly his penchant for reconstructing parts of the palace on fairly flimsy factual grounds. No matter, thought most of the watching world. Evans’s discovery flung the door wide open on the brilliant 4,000-year-old civilisation he named ‘Minoan’ after its best-known, if not quite verifiable, ruler. By their paintings and sculptures, their buildings and engravings, the Minoans stood revealed as a vibrant, peaceful, prosperous and life-loving people, dancers and musicians, traders and manufacturers of beautiful jewellery and pottery, worshippers of bulls and of the deities in nature, able to read and write long before any of their European counterparts, with a spiritual and artistic sensibility far in advance of anything that had been expected of so ancient a culture.
    Where there was one Minoan palace, there must be more. So judged the archaeologists, native and foreign, as they combed the island during the