The Minotaur and the Labyrinth in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Excerpted from Ovid's Metamorphoses (from Allen Mandelbaum's 1993 translation, published by Harcourt):

As soon as Minos, disembarking, touched
the soil of Crete, he sacrificed to Jove
the hundred bulls he owned; his palace walls
were soon adorned with trophies, spoils of war.
But now the foul obscenity that shamed
the family of Minos grew: the strange
half-human and half-beast, the monstrous child
of Minos' queen, the living proof of vile
adultery. And so the kind decides
to place the shame that stains his marriage far
apart from Minos' house: he wants to hide
the monster in a labryrinth, where blind
and complicated corridors entwine.
The famous builder, Daedalus, designs
and then constructs this maze. He tricks the eye
with many twisting paths that double back--
one's left without a point of reference.
As in the Phrygian fields, the clear Meander
delights in flowing back and forth, a course
that is ambiguous; it doubles back
and so beholds its waves before they go
and come; and now it faces its own source,
and now the open sea; and so its waves
are never sure that they've not gone astray;
just so did Daedalus, within his maze,
along the endless ways disseminate
uncertainty; in fact the artifex
himself could scarcely trace the proper path
back to the gate--it was that intricate.

And it was in this labyrinth of Crete
that Minos jailed the monstrous Minotaur,
the biform bull-and-man. And twice the king
gave him Athenians to eat--these, each
nine years, were picked by lot to feed the beast.
But at the third return of those nine years,
the beast was killed by Theseus, Aegeus' son.
He, helped by Ariadne, Minos' daughter,
was able to retrace his steps: she gave
a thread to him, which he would then rewind,
and so he found the entrance gate again--
a thing that none before had ever done.
Without delay he sailed away to Naxos.
He'd taken Ariadne with him, yet
he showed no pity: on that shore he left
the faithful girl. And Ariadne wept
till Bacchus came; that god was warm and fond,
and he embraced the girl; through him she won
a place in heaven as the Northern Crown--
Corona--an eternal constellation;
for from her brow, he took her diadem
and sent it up to heaven. Through thin air,
it flew, and in its flight, its gems were changed:
they blazed as flames--but its crown-shape was saved.
Now Ariadne's diadem is placed
between the Gripper stars, which hold the Snake,
and those that show the Kneeling Hercules.