Word: cretans
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...they are to be put into a maze called the labyrinth and devoured by a fearsome creature, half-man, half-bull, called the Minotaur. Either by lot or insistence, Theseus becomes one of the seven youths and sets sail for Crete. There he wins the love of Ariadne, a Cretan princess, who gives him a magic sword with which to kill the Minotaur and a spool of cord with which to thread his way back out of the maze. On the way home to Athens, Theseus puzzlingly abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos. He also fails to change...
...whole myth, with all its subplots, is a good deal more labyrinthine than that, and Author Renault threads her way as skillfully through it as Theseus did through the Minotaur's cave. Much of it is a sheer adventure yarn, full of javelin-play, wrestling, bull dancing (the Cretan version of bullfighting) and those gory sudden deaths and bloody double dealings to which the ancient Greeks were so prone that they probably invented the serene idea of the "golden mean" as an antidote...
...five are led by a man so tough and tight-lipped that he would make Bulldog Drummond seem like a pacifist balletomane, they pull off this miraculous stunt. The superman is Captain Keith Mallory, a New Zealand mountaineer, "idol of the cragsmen," hero of legendary exploits in the Cretan resistance...
Athenian authorities ordered a marble plaque put up renaming the Athens street fronting the British embassy "Karaolis-Demetriou Street." A Cretan merchant offered a $300,000 reward for Sir John Harding's head, to match Harding's offer of $30,000 for information leading to the capture of Colonel George Grivas, the British-trained ex-Greek army officer reputed to head EOKA...
Biggest Puzzle. Patrick is a kind of dilettante snowman, "detached to the point of selfishness in his chosen serenity . . . his violin-playing, his botany, his photography, his collection of Cretan ikous." Corfu thaws him out-first with a throb of color from its sapphire sea and sky, orange groves and olive trees, then with the pastoral charm of tinkling goat bells and squat white stone houses, and finally with its people, who teach him a language of the heart that is puzzlingly Greek to him. Biggest puzzle of all is his Venus de Miloesque wife Iris, who plunges into...