Ariadne (poem) "and both story and verse have a breath-taking rapidity that is wholly admirable." He regretted, however, that Lucas had not used language in the modernist way, with obliqueness and ambiguity. "The Listener" did not share this regret: "While preserving the great metrical tradition," its reviewer wrote, ""Ariadne" is a continuous refreshment of it, and is free at once of archaic pedantries and modernist affectations." More recently, Simon Tidworth in "The Quest for Theseus" (1970) believed that making the Minotaur Minos in a bull-mask was "a real stroke of originality", but, comparing the two works, preferred Nikos Kazantzakis' drama "Κούρος, ή
Minotaur the main political and cultural potency in the Aegean Sea. As the fledgling Athens (and probably other continental Greek cities) was under tribute to Crete, it can be assumed that such tribute included young men and women for sacrifice. This ceremony was performed by a priest disguised with a bull head or mask, thus explaining the imagery of the Minotaur. Once continental Greece was free from Crete's dominance, the myth of the Minotaur worked to distance the forming religious consciousness of the Hellene "poleis" from Minoan beliefs. The Minotaur ("infamia di Creti", Italian for "infamy of Crete"), appears briefly in