Theseus seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again. In another version, King Minos had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus. On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one
Labyrinth all the temples of Egypt, the so-called Labyrinth, of which, however, only the foundation stones have been preserved." Herodotus' description of the Egyptian Labyrinth inspired some central scenes in Bolesław Prus' 1895 historical novel, "Pharaoh". Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" (36.90) lists the legendary Smilis, reputed to be a contemporary of Daedalus, together with the historical mid-sixth-century BC architects and sculptors Rhoikos and Theodoros as two of the makers of the Lemnian labyrinth, which Andrew Stewart regards as "evidently a misunderstanding of the Samian temple's location "en limnais" ['in the marsh']." According to Pliny, the tomb of the great Etruscan