OOOOOOH WHAAAAT
[Spoilers and speculation continue]
I didn't even get close to making the connection with Io being transformed into a heifer! Based on what Asterion heard in Hades, I was guessing minotaur births were just something that *waves hands* just happen every so often in Crete, and that was the source and extent of the lore. Connecting that to Io is quite elegant; perhaps some sort of matrilineal descent from her line?
It's possible that Argos, the "caretaker," is the actual stand-in for Argus Panoptes ("all-seeing"). His name is spelled Argus in my (modern, English) copy of Metamorphoses, but looking on Wikipedia the original Greek name is spelled with an omicron; normally that would be romanised as an o, Argus is just how Ovid Latinised it.
…which is a long-winded way of saying Argus and Argos are variant spellings of the same Greek word. That tempts me to say the P–Panoptes theory is overthinking things, but frankly:
- the day I stop generating wild hypotheses I want you to take me out back and shoot me; and
- given the ridiculous volume and quality of content written for the artifacts you can find, the authors are super detail-oriented people who are also overthinking everything—probably more than us. ;)