MINOTAURING IN SYDNEY

 François Sicard's Theseus Defeating the Minotaur, standing somewhat incongruously within Sydney's Archibald Fountain, appears at first glance to commemorate one of the defining triumphs of Greek mythology. A victorious Theseus stands naked above the creature he has just slain, one hand gripping the Minotaur's horns as the defeated body collapses beneath him in its final agonies. Sicard leaves little doubt where the viewer's sympathies are intended to lie. The hero's body is complete, idealised and emphatically masculine, his exposed genitals proclaiming the civilised virility that nineteenth century classicism habitually associated with moral superiority. Beneath him, the Minotaur possesses no corresponding sexual identity. His body, although overwhelmingly human, has been stripped of every visible marker of manhood. Only the great curling horns remain in parody of his emasculation, reducing him entirely to animality, as though his humanity has already been extinguished before Theseus delivers the final blow.

The longer the eye lingers upon the composition, the less persuasive Sicard's moral certainties become. The defeated creature gradually begins to attract a sympathy that the sculptor almost certainly intended for the triumphant hero standing above him. Such a reversal owes less to sentiment than to language itself. Greek mythology has preserved this episode almost exclusively through the eyes of kings and heroes, with the consequence that the fallen creature survives in memory under the title bestowed upon him by those who imprisoned him. We know him as the Minotaur, Minos' Bull, Minos' Beast, names that define ownership rather than identity. Ancient tradition, however, preserves another name entirely: Asterion, or Asterios, "he who belongs to the stars." There is a cruel irony in the circumstance that a being whose very name evokes the heavens should spend his entire existence imprisoned beneath the earth, wandering a labyrinth from which neither sunlight nor starlight could penetrate. The transformation from Asterion to Minotaur is therefore far more than a change of nomenclature. It is the first act of his dehumanisation, where an innocent child is subsumed into the identity imposed by his captor, remembered thereafter only as an extension of Minos himself. Before mythology has even begun to explain who Asterion is, it has already denied him the right to exist as himself.

From the outset, he is the unwilling victim of the transgressions of others. Minos breaks his oath to Poseidon after refusing to sacrifice the magnificent white bull sent by the sea god. Poseidon, however, never directs his vengeance against the oath breaker. Instead, he elects to punish Minos through the person whom the king regards as his own. Pasiphaë, despite being the daughter of Helios himself, is a mere woman and thus enjoys no protection from divine caprice. Seized by an irresistible passion imposed upon her by Poseidon, she couples with the very bull her husband had refused to sacrifice, conceiving Asterion. Euripides' Cretans strips away any suggestion that she acted willingly. Confronted by Minos' accusations, she responds with devastating irony. What conceivable attraction, she asks, could a bull possibly have possessed? Was it his handsome robes, the fire in his eyes or the colour of his beard? The true offence belongs to Minos alone. Yet neither Minos nor Poseidon must endure its consequences.

The consequences instead descend upon the only participant in the entire catastrophe whose innocence is beyond dispute. Conceived through an act intended not to punish him but to wound Minos, born illegitimate, the bastard child of divine vengeance rather than human desire, Asterion enters the world already carrying upon his own body the visible consequences of another man's impiety. Greek mythology, however, displays remarkably little interest in that injustice. His hybrid form rapidly ceases to be understood as the consequence of Poseidon's punishment and becomes instead the explanation for Asterion himself, so that before he has performed a single voluntary act, exercised the slightest degree of moral agency or revealed virtue, cruelty, pity or malice through conduct rather than appearance, the verdict has already been delivered. The bull's head no longer signifies what has happened to him. It becomes sufficient evidence of what he is presumed to be.

From that moment onwards, Asterion undergoes a progressive narrative dispossession. The surviving tradition preserves with meticulous care the motives of Minos, the violated innocence of Pasiphaë, the ingenuity of Daedalus and the heroism of Theseus, yet almost never pauses to consider Asterion as a consciousness in his own right. Ancient authors repeatedly describe his body whilst displaying remarkably little curiosity about his mind, reducing him to what one modern scholar has aptly called "a prisoned body and a dynastic embarrassment" rather than a fully agentic character. His appearance therefore ceases merely to distinguish him physically and begins instead to replace biography, motive and interiority altogether. From that moment onwards, Asterion undergoes a progressive narrative dispossession. The surviving tradition preserves with meticulous care the motives of Minos, the violated innocence of Pasiphaë, the ingenuity of Daedalus and the heroism of Theseus, yet almost never pauses to consider Asterion as a consciousness in his own right. Ancient authors repeatedly describe his body whilst displaying remarkably little curiosity about his mind, reducing him to what one modern scholar has aptly called "a prisoned body and a dynastic embarrassment" rather than a fully agentic character. His appearance therefore ceases merely to distinguish him physically and begins instead to replace biography, motive and interiority altogether. Once that substitution has taken place, Asterion can no longer exist within the narrative as a son, a brother or even a child. He has become an identity constructed almost entirely from his usefulness to others. The next stage of the myth is therefore not simply to imprison him but to preserve that construction.

The labyrinth nevertheless serves a purpose that extends well beyond concealment. Hiding Asterion from public view removes the visible evidence of Minos' shame, yet concealment alone cannot restore the king's authority. So long as the being beneath the palace continues to be recognised as an abandoned child, sympathy remains capable of attaching itself to the victim rather than to the ruler. Asterion must therefore become something other than a child. He must become the monster whose imprisonment appears not merely understandable but necessary. The labyrinth provides the conditions under which that transformation can occur. Removed from family, companionship, language, education and every ordinary relationship through which human beings acquire identity, he is progressively deprived of those qualities by which others might continue to recognise him as one of themselves. When the ancient sources finally encounter the creature within the labyrinth, they describe a beast whose savagery appears self-evident, yet display almost no curiosity concerning the decades of abandonment that preceded it. Brutality is treated as the cause of his imprisonment when it is equally possible to regard it as one of its consequences. The myth thereby completes one of its most subtle inversions. It presents the humanity Asterion has lost as though it had never existed.

Theseus therefore inherits rather than creates Asterion's monstrosity. Long before he descends into the labyrinth, the essential work has already been accomplished. By the time the Athenian prince confronts him, scarcely anything remains except the monstrous identity that others have patiently constructed. The death within the labyrinth therefore represents less the destruction of a beast than the final obliteration of a human being whom the narrative has progressively rendered incapable of being perceived as such.

François Sicard's sculpture faithfully perpetuates that tradition. Standing before the bronze in Sydney, the spectator is invited to celebrate the triumph of civilisation over savagery, reason over appetite and humanity over brute instinct, yet the composition depends upon precisely the same assumptions that have shaped the myth from the beginning. The defeated figure possesses no history beyond his monstrosity, no identity beyond the name imposed upon him by the man who imprisoned him and no claim upon our sympathy except that which gradually forces itself upon us despite the sculptor's intentions. Sicard does not simply represent an ancient story. He inherits an ancient judgement.

Perhaps that is why Sicard's sculpture becomes increasingly difficult to behold the longer one remains before it. The bronze appears to commemorate the triumph of civilisation over monstrosity, yet it preserves without question the very assumptions that first made such a triumph possible. The creature lying beneath Theseus is denied even in death the humanity that had been progressively stripped from him throughout his life, his body continuing to speak more loudly than his name, his birth, his innocence or his suffering. The spectator is invited to admire the hero whilst overlooking the long sequence of dispossessions that rendered heroism possible in the first place, for Theseus does not confront Asterion as he was born, but as kings, gods, imprisonment and memory have patiently remade him. Standing before the monument, one gradually realises that the greatest violence in the story was never the stroke of the hero's sword. It was the slow destruction of a human identity until nothing remained but a monster, and the still more unsettling realisation that, almost three millennia later, we continue to participate in that destruction every time we call him the Minotaur.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 10 October 2026