Pasiphaë: Virgo Infelix

 

One of the anecdotes Silenus mentions in his song is about Pasiphaë.

 

To give a little background on her origins, Pasiphaë is the immortal daughter of Helios the sun god and Perse a sea nymph. She has a couple famous siblings as well: Circe, Perses, and Aeëtes. We know Circe very well from Homer’s Odyssey, and Aeëtes is the father of Medea, of Euripedes’ Medea. Pasiphaë was given to King Minos of Crete as a wife and subsequently gave birth to nine children, the most notable of which are Ariadne, Phaedra, and Asterion otherwise known as the Minotaur. Her lineage is attested by Pseudo-Apollodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Pseudo-Hyginus, Cicero, Ovid and Nonnus.

 

In Eclogue 6 Silenus focuses on the reason why the Minotaur was born, namely his conception. According to the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Pasiphaë was punished by the actions of her husband Minos when he disobeyed Poseidon (3.8-11). Angered by the disrespect, the sea god took the bull which was given as a gift in the first place and made Pasiphaë fall in love with it. The lust-stricken Pasiphaë turned to Daedalus a renowned architect so that he would make a device for her to “get close” to the bull. “He built a wooden cow on wheels, . . . skinned a real cow, and sewed the contraption into the skin, and then, after placing Pasiphae inside, set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed. The bull came up and had intercourse with it, as if with a real cow.” From this union the Minotaur was born who became the antagonist for the hero Theseus. This sequence of events is also recorded in the Bacchylides, Callimachus, Diodorus Siculus, Philostratus the Elder, Pseudo-Hyginus, Ovid, Propertius, Seneca, Nonnus, and of course Vergil.

 

Besides being the unfortunate mother of the Minotaur, Pasiphaë had similar skills to her sister Circe. Her witchcraft also concerns animal transfiguration. Again, in the Bibliotheca: “But if a woman had sex with Minos, she could not be saved; for after he had slept with many women, Pasiphae put him under a spell whereby, whenever he went to bed with another woman, he would ejaculate wild creatures into her vagina, thus killing her.” (3.197-8).

 

All of my information comes from theoi.com.