Content Warning: This section features mentions of sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, violence against children, child death, and suicide.

The novel opens with the story of a “righteous man”: King Minos of Crete, who wages war on Athens in retribution for the death of his son, Androgeos. On the way to Athens, Minos conquers the kingdom of Megara, ruled by King Nisus, with the help of Nisus’s own daughter, Scylla. Scylla falls in love with King Minos and divulges her family and her homeland’s secrets, including the key to defeating Nisus—cutting his red lock of hair. Nisus is slain and Megara falls, but Minos punishes the lovestruck Scylla for her treachery against her father and homeland, tying her to the back of his boat and drowning her. Though she aided his own victory, he is “disgusted by her lack of proper daughterly devotion” (1).

Ariadne is a princess of Crete and daughter of King Minos. She recounts stories of Scylla’s cruel fate and her father’s conquests. As a gift to Minos, the god Zeus sent a devastating plague across Athens that helped to secure the king’s victory in the war. Athens agreed to his demand that the city send seven Athenian youths and seven maidens to Crete to be fed to the Minotaur, a ferocious beast living in a labyrinth beneath Minos’s palace.