Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

---

Pasiphaë

（Πασιφάη). A daughter of Helios (the Sun) and Perseïs, and a sister of Circé and Aeëtes. She was the wife of Minos, by whom she became the mother of Androgeos, Catreus, Deucalion, Glaucus, Acallé, Xenodicé, Ariadné, and Phaedra. Hence Phaedra is called Pasipheïa (Ovid, Met. xv. 500). As a punishment for Minos who had failed to carry out a vow that he had made, Pasiphaë was inspired by Poseidon with a violent passion for a bull. By a device of the artisan Daedalus, who enclosed her in a wooden cow, Pasiphaë was enabled to gratify her desires, and became by the bull the mother of the monster Minotaurus, a creature half man and half bull. (See Minos; Theseus.) There is a poem De Pasiphaë of twenty-two lines in the Latin Anthology, ascribed to Rufinus Antiochensis (Bährens, Poet. Lat. Min. v. 108).