Greek hybrids cannot be read in isolation. To understand them requires an examination of the Near Eastern antecedents. The Greek imagination was powerfully influenced by a creative engagement with other cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean. These engagements were characterized by bilingualism, intermarriage and the movement of artisans, traders, poets and itinerant religious practitioners. Such a pattern of cultural exchange can be seen in the so-called International Style of the Late Bronze Age, which relied heavily on hybrid motifs to fashion a shared visual language for the elites of Egypt and the Near East. In this context, the significance of hybrids varied depending on audience or market. Taweret in Egypt was utterly transformed when taken up on Crete. Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies shared many characteristics, but Greek speakers freely adapted old motifs. Wherever we find traces of cultural exchange, ideas and objects always take on new forms in Greek settings. Each instance of a hybrid emerging in a Greek context it is testimony to the flexibility of hybrids to convey new meanings in new settings. Hybrids gave a face to the shock of the new.

This chapter explores hybridity by exploring the figure of the Minotaur in the context of a number of similar ancient creatures, such as the centaurs and satyrs, and of the god of shepherds, flocks, and the wild: Pan. It illustrates that the peculiar hybridity of the Minotaur and the ancient story explaining his genesis raise questions about the scope and limits of human intervention into the realm of nature. It shows that, rather than exploring the limits of the human in positive ways, the figure of the Minotaur manifests the monstrous consequences of human transgression.

In the mythological account inherited by Ovid, Pasiphae went through a psychological transformation in which she was assailed by the grotesque desire to be mated by a bull. She thereby lowered the human character of her sexuality to that of an animal. When Ovid imports her story into the domain of elegy, her degradation runs counter to the genre’s conventional idealization of sexual life. Yet Ovid’s Pasiphae lives out that craving as if propelled by the rhetoric of elegy. She is a queen pursuing a beloved in a georgic landscape, but she behaves like a composite of the elegiac puella and the elegiac lover. Pasiphae thereby brings her grotesque psychology into the imaginative world of elegy, cultivating her dark desire under its mannerisms, until she manages to have sex with the bull. The elegiac echoes of her role in the erotic scenario, the meter in which it is outlined, and the elegiac allusions in its images – these all shift the ground of the reading experience from the mythical horror of aberrant sexuality to the realm of the elegiac grotesque, in which nefarious eroticism and elegiac love conventions are fused, appearing at once monstrous, contemptuous, and ridiculous.

The description of Daedalus’ labyrinth, built as prison without possibility of escape for the Minotaur, is one of Ovid’s most famous passages. Modern, and especially postmodern, theory has often regarded the labyrinth as an analogy to complex literary compositions, with Ariadne’s thread as a kind of reader’s guide through such textual mazes. (Scholars regard Daedalus as a creative analogy to Ovid himself.) Chapter 4 accordingly centers on literal and figurative screen labyrinths. Since around 1960, elusive nonlinear plots became prominent in cinematic narratives, especially in French New Wave cinema. One film is of primary importance in this regard. Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais from a script by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, is set in and around an intricate maze-like building, in which time and place seem to exert a hallucinatory effect on the film’s characters and, in equal measure, on its viewers. Fascinating labyrinths appear in various film genres as well. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining features one literal and one figurative maze; the latter, a large and complex building that exerts a demonic will, is the more deadly one. The titular house of Harry Kümel’s cult favorite Malpertuis is even more hellish – literally so because of its connection with classical Underworld mythology. Briefer discussions of two stylish mysteries, Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose, lead to a final section with appreciations of other screen labyrinths and Minotaurs.