But the great King was by no means so fortunate in his domestic relationships as in his foreign adventures. The domestic skeleton in his case was the composite monster the Minotaur, half man, half bull, fabled to have been the fruit of a monstrous passion on the part of the King's wife, Pasiphae. This monster was kept shut up within a vast and intricate building called the Labyrinth, contrived for Minos by his renowned artificer, Daedalus. Further, when his own son, Androgeos, had gone to Athens to contend in the Panathenaic games, having overcome all the other Greeks in the sports, he fell a victim to the suspicion of AEgeus, the King of Athens, who caused him to be slain, either by waylaying him on the road to Thebes, or by sending him against the Marathonian bull. In his sorrow and righteous anger, Minos, who had already conquered Megara by the treachery of Scylla, raised a great fleet, and levied war upon Athens; and, having wasted Attica with fire and sword, he at length reduced the land to such straits that King AEgeus and his Athenians were glad to submit to the hard terms which were asked of them. The demand of Minos was that every ninth year Athens should send him as tribute seven youths and seven maidens. These were selected by lot, or, according to another version of the legend, chosen by Minos himself, and on their arrival in Crete were cast into the Labyrinth, to become the prey of the monstrous Minotaur. The first and second instalments of this ghastly tribute had already been paid; but when the time of the third tribute was drawing nigh, the predestined deliverer of Athens appeared in the person of the hero Theseus. Theseus was the unacknowledged son of King AEgeus and the Princess Aithra of Troezen. He had been brought up by his mother at Troezen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out to make his way to the Court of AEgeus and secure acknowledgment as the rightful son of the Athenian King. The legend tells how on his way to Athens he cleared the lands through which he journeyed of the pests which had infested them. Sinnis, the pine-bender, who tied his miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back, the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon, the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes, who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed, stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other plagues of society were abated by the young hero. Not long after his arrival at Athens and acknowledgment by his father, the time came round when the Minoan heralds should come to Athens to claim the victims for the Minotaur. Seeing the grief that prevailed in the city, and the anger of the people against his father, AEgeus, whom they accounted the cause of their misfortune, Theseus determined