Ovid described the Minotaur’s origin and Theseus’s victory in Metamorphoses. His Latin poem retells many Greek myths, including the story of Pasiphae, the Cretan bull, the Minotaur, and Theseus’s journey through the Labyrinth.
Metamorphoses was composed in the early first century CE and contains fifteen books of mythological narrative. Ovid’s account helped preserve and popularize the Minotaur story for later European readers, although it was written centuries after the earliest Greek versions of the legend.
Ovid presents the Minotaur as the result of Pasiphae’s union with a bull and describes the creature’s confinement in the intricate structure designed by Daedalus. His retelling is one literary version rather than the only ancient account; Greek myth also survives through writers such as Apollodorus and Plutarch.
A common mix-up is naming Virgil, another major Roman poet. Virgil wrote the Aeneid and referred to several Greek myths, but Ovid is the poet associated with the full Metamorphoses narrative.