Europa, the Phoenician princess carried off by Zeus as a bull

Europa is a Phoenician princess, daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre or Sidon, whom Zeus carried off in the shape of a white bull and brought across the sea to Crete. There she became the mother of Minos and Rhadamanthys, and so the ancestor of the whole Cretan royal house. Her disappearance also sent her brother Cadmus on the search that ended with the founding of Thebes. Europa does very little in her own myth, yet few figures set so much in motion.

A daughter of Phoenicia

The sources disagree about her father. In the Iliad, Zeus himself calls her “the daughter of far-famed Phoenix” (14.321), and the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women agrees. Later mythographers, summarised by Apollodorus, make her the daughter of Agenor and Telephassa and the sister of Cadmus, Phoenix and Cilix (3.1.1). Phoenix is demoted from father to brother, and becomes the eponym of the Phoenicians, just as Cilix gives his name to Cilicia.

The wobble is revealing. For Greek genealogists, Europa was a connector: through her they tied the Phoenician coast to Crete, and through Cadmus to Boeotia.

The white bull

The classic telling is Ovid’s (Metamorphoses, 2.833-875). Hermes, on Zeus’ orders, drives Agenor’s cattle down to the shore where the princess is playing with her companions. Among them walks the king of the gods, a bull as white as untrodden snow, with small horns “clearer than any jewel”. Europa hesitates, comes closer, offers him flowers, hangs garlands on his horns and finally sits on his back. The bull wades in, then swims out, and she finds herself on the open sea, one hand gripping a horn, the other on his back, her dress fluttering in the wind.

The fullest ancient version is the idyll Europa by Moschus, written in the second century BC. It adds a warning dream in which two continents, in the shape of two women, fight over the girl: Asia, who raised her, and an unknown land that wins her. Moschus also describes Europa’s golden basket, made by Hephaestus and decorated, in a knowing touch, with the story of Io, another of Zeus’ loves turned into a cow. During the crossing Nereids and Tritons escort her, and Poseidon smooths the sea for his brother.

Gortyn, the plane tree and the sons of Zeus

In Crete, Zeus returned to his own form. Local tradition at Gortyn placed their union beneath a plane tree that never again shed its leaves; Theophrastus and Pliny still mention the evergreen tree there. Gortyn’s coins show Europa sitting in a tree, sometimes with an eagle.

From this union came Minos, Rhadamanthys and, in Hesiod and Apollodorus, Sarpedon. Zeus then gave Europa in marriage to Asterius, king of Crete, who adopted her sons (Apollodorus, 3.1.2). Minos would rule at Knossos; Rhadamanthys, proverbial for fairness, ended up as a judge of the dead or in the Elysian Fields; Sarpedon left to found a kingdom in Lycia.

Zeus also left her gifts. In Apollonius of Rhodes it is to Europa that he gives Talos, the last survivor of the race of bronze, who ran round Crete three times a day to keep strangers away, and whom Medea would bring down when the Argonauts sailed home (Argonautica, 4.1638-1648). Other sources add a hound, Laelaps, and a javelin, both of which never missed, and which passed from hand to hand until they reached Procris.

The bull itself was set among the stars. For Eratosthenes it is the constellation Taurus, only the front half of which is visible because the animal is swimming half-submerged (Catasterisms, 14).

The brothers’ search

Agenor, in despair, sent his sons to find their sister and forbade them to return without her. None found her and none went home. Phoenix settled in Phoenicia, Cilix in Cilicia, Thasus on the island named after him, and Cadmus, after consulting the oracle at Delphi, founded Thebes in Boeotia (Apollodorus, 3.1.1 and 3.4.1). The abduction of Europa works as a story of dispersal, explaining how heroes from the East came to settle in Greece.

What the historians made of it

Herodotus opens his Histories with a demythologised version. According to the Persians, he says, some Greeks, probably Cretans, carried off the king of Tyre’s daughter in revenge for the Phoenicians’ abduction of Io. Europa becomes one link in a chain of tit-for-tat kidnappings between Asia and Greece that ends with the Trojan War (1.2).

In Book 4, the same author wonders about the continent’s name. Nobody knows, he writes, where the name comes from or who gave it. People say it comes from Europa of Tyre, yet she was Asian and never reached the land the Greeks call Europe, having travelled only from Phoenicia to Crete (4.45). The first Greek historian already treated the link between the princess and the continent as a tradition rather than an explanation.

Cult and afterlife

In Crete Europa was honoured as Hellotis. Athenaeus reports that at the festival of the Hellotia a huge myrtle wreath was carried in procession, said to contain her bones (15.678a-b). The myth has had an enormous visual afterlife, from a temple metope at Selinus to Titian’s and Rembrandt’s paintings. It has also entered the imagery of modern Europe: the Greek €2 coin shows Europa on the bull, and the euro banknotes of the Europa series carry her portrait, taken from an ancient vase in the Louvre, in their watermark and hologram.

Further reading

For the dynasty she founded, read Minos, then her granddaughters Ariadne and Phaedra. For her brother and the founding of Thebes, see Cadmus. For Zeus and his other mortal loves, see Zeus, Danaë, Alcmene and Semele, Europa’s niece through Cadmus.