Minos seven young men and seven virgin maidens to feed the Minotaur every year (which corresponded directly to the Minoans' meticulous records of lunar alignments - a full moon falls on the equinoxes once every eight years). This continued until Theseus killed the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne, Minos' lovestruck daughter. Minos was also part of the King Nisus story. Nisus was King of Megara, and he was invincible as long as a lock of crimson hair still existed, hidden in his white hair. Minos attacked Megara but Nisus knew he could not be beaten because he still had his
Bacchus and Ariadne (poem) Ariadne" was toned down and contained a "sociability" that was mentioned in the preface of Hunt's "Foliage". When placed into a sequence following "Hero and Leander", the "Bacchus and Ariadne" is a consolation to the themes of the first. Bacchus is able to save Ariadne, whereas no one was able to save Hero. Hunt relied on the story from Ovid's "Heroides" to base his poem, but Hunt describes an end result to the story that Ovid leaves untold. A major connection between Hunt's and Ovid's version is that they begin at sunrise. Ovid uses the sunrise to show that Ariadne