The ball of twine in the episode "And the Horns of a Dilemma" is called a "clue", which is what the princess gave Theseus to help find his way out of the Labyrinth after he killed the Minotaur. That is where our current word comes from.
Jenkins mentions Nicolas Flamel as an immortal. Flamel was a French scribe and publisher who dabbled in alchemy and died in 1418. In the 1600s publishers needed a name to sell their fabricated 'ancient' alchemy manuscripts and recreated Flamel as a very successful, very rich, and now immortal alchemist who supposedly had discovered how to make the philosopher's stone.
Jenkins mentions the Black Mask as someone who doesn't die and always pops up when you need him. The Black Mask is a Hong Kong comic book and movie superhero. He is the only survivor of a disastrous military experiment that created supersoldiers. His public identity is that of a mild mannered librarian.
The Minoan civilization of Crete predated classical Greece by almost 1000 years. One of the surviving Minoan myths involves the man/bull Minotaur in his labrynth maze. The double headed axe was a very important Minoan cultural symbol, and was often represented by a golden axe.
Tyler Mane and Rebecca Romijn previously appeared together as Sabretooth and Mystique respectively in Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000).