ith the same fate.

Medea escaped by means of a chariot drawn by winged serpents, sent her
by her grandfather Helios (the sun). As the story is told by Euripides,
she killed her children before taking to flight, leaving their dead
bodies to blast the sight of their horror-stricken father. The legend,
however, tells a different tale. It says that she left them for safety
before the altar in the temple of Juno; and that the Corinthians,
furious at the death of their king, dragged the children from the altar
and put them to death. As for the unhappy Jason, the story goes that he
fell asleep under the ship Argo, which had been hauled ashore according
to the custom of the ancients, and that a fragment of this ship fell
upon and killed him.

The flight of Medea took her to Athens, where she found a protector and
second husband in AEgeus, the ruler of that city, and father of Theseus,
the great legendary hero of Athens.

_THESEUS AND ARIADNE._

Minos, king of Crete in the age of legend, made war against Athens in
revenge for the death of his son. This son, Androgeos by name, had shown
such strength and skill in the Panathenaic festival that AEgeus, the
Athenian king, sent him to fight with the flame-spitting bull of
Marathon, a monstrous creature that was ravaging the plains of Attica.
The bull killed the valiant youth, and Minos, furious at the death of
his son, laid siege to Athens.

As he proved unable to capture the city, he prayed for aid to his father
Zeus (for, like all the heroes of legend, he was a son of the gods).
Zeus sent pestilence and famine on Athens, and so bitter grew the lot of
the Athenians that they applied to the oracles of the gods for advice in
their sore strait, and were bidden to submit to any terms which Minos
might impose. The terms offered by the offended king of Crete were
severe ones. He demanded that the Athenians should, at fixed periods,
send to Crete seven youths and seven maidens, as victims to the
insatiable appetite of the Minotaur.

This fabulous creature was one of those destructive monsters of which
many ravaged Greece in the age of fable. It had the body of a man and
the head of a bull, and so great was the havoc it wrought among the
Cretans that Minos engaged the great artist Daedalus to construct a den
from which it could not escape. Daedalus built for this purpose the
Labyrinth, a far-extending edifice, in which were countless passages, so
winding and intertwining tha