Europa

Phoenician princess, daughter of King Agenor of Tyre, carried off by Zeus — in the shape of a white bull that swam out of the sea and knelt before her on the beach of Tyre as she gathered flowers with her companions — across the Mediterranean to Crete, where the god resumed his true form and lay with her under the plane-tree at Gortyn, and where she bore him Minos the law-giver and later judge of the dead, Rhadamanthys the just, and (in the post-Homeric tradition) Sarpedon who would die at Troy under the hand of Patroclus (Homer *Iliad* 14.321–322 names 'the daughter of Phoenix' as Zeus's consort and mother of only Minos and Rhadamanthys — the Homeric variant that makes Europa's father Phoenix rather than Agenor and that knows only two sons, not three; the three-son version with Sarpedon is Hesiod fr. 140–141 M-W + Apollodorus *Bibliotheca* 3.1.1–2; Moschus *Europa* (the Hellenistic miniature epic, c. 150 BC — the primary literary account of the abduction); Ovid *Metamorphoses* 2.836–875 + 3.1–49; Herodotus 1.2.1 preserves the rationalising Phoenician-pirate-raid version). Zeus gave her three gifts: the bronze giant Talos to guard the coasts of Crete; a spear that never missed; a dog that never failed to catch (Apollod. 3.1.2). Married afterward to King Asterion of Crete, who adopted her three sons. The continent of Europe takes its name from her — the canonical eastern-into-western migration of a founding-mother.

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