Androgeus

Son of Minos and Pasiphaë of Crete, and the immediate cause of the Athenian tribute of fourteen youths to the Minotaur. He came to Athens as a young man to compete in the Panathenaic games and won every event he entered; Aegeus, jealous or suspicious of the Cretan prince's triumph and Cretan ambitions in Attica, sent him against the Marathonian bull, which killed him — or, in the parallel tradition, the Athenians ambushed him on his way to the Theban games at the pass near Oenoe (Apollodorus 3.15.7; Diodorus 4.60.4–5). Minos went to war to avenge the killing, besieged Athens, called down a plague through his father Zeus when the siege stalled, and settled for the tribute of seven youths and seven maidens every nine years as food for the Minotaur (Apollod. 3.15.8 / *Epit.* 1.7; Plutarch *Theseus* 15). His elder brother Minos is sometimes said to have punished Athens directly through the agency of his son Deucalion, but the tribute-settlement is the tradition the Theseus cycle builds on.

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