The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 4

island stepping-stones to the
Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'--marks it out as designed by
Nature to be a centre of development in the culture of the early Ægean
race, and, in point of fact, ancient traditions unanimously pointed to the
great island as being the birthplace of Greek civilization. The most
ambitious tradition boldly transcended the limits of human occupation,
and gave to Divinity itself a place of nurture in the fastnesses of the
Cretan mountains. That many-sided deity, the supreme god of the

Greek theology, had in one of his aspects a special connection with the
island. The great son of Kronos and Rhea, threatened by his unnatural
father with the same doom which had overtaken his brethren, was said
to have been saved by his mother, who substituted for him a stone,
which her unsuspecting spouse devoured, thinking it to be his son.
Rhea fled to Crete to bear her son, either in the Idæan or the Dictæan
cave, where he was nourished with honey and goat's milk by the nymph
Amaltheia until the time was ripe for his vengeance upon his father. (It
has been suggested that in this somewhat grotesque legend we have a
parabolic representation of one of the great religious facts of that
ancient world--the supersession by the new anthropomorphic faith of
the older cult, whose objects of adoration, made without hands, and
devoid of human likeness, were sacred stones or trees. Kronos, the
representative of the old faith, clung to his sacred stone, while the new
human God was being born, before whose worship the ancient cult of
the pillar and the tree should pass away.)
In the Dictæan cave, also, Zeus grown to maturity, was united to
Europa, the daughter of man, in the sacred marriage from which sprang
Minos, the great legendary figure of Crete. And to Crete the island god
returned to close his divine life. Primitive legend asserted that his tomb
was on Mount Juktas, the conical hill which overlooks the ruins of the
city of Minos, his son, his friend, and his priest. It was this surprising
claim of the Cretans to possess the burial-place of the supreme God of
Hellas which first attached to them the unenviable reputation for
falsehood which clung to them throughout the classical period, and was
crystallized by Callimachus in the form adopted by St. Paul in the
Epistle to Titus--'The Cretans are alway liars.'
It is round Minos, the son of Zeus and Europa, that the bulk of the
Cretan legends gathers. The suggestion has been made, with great
probability, that the name Minos is not so much the name of a single
person as the title of a race of kings. 'I suspect,' says Professor Murray,
'that Minos was a name, like "Pharaoh" or "Cæsar," given to all Cretan
Kings of a certain type.' With that, however, we need not concern
ourselves at present, further than to notice that the bearer of the name
appears in the legends in many different characters, scarcely consistent

with one another, or with his being a single person. According to the
story, Minos is not only the son but also the 'gossip' of Zeus; he is, like
Abraham, 'the friend of God.' He receives from the hand of God, like
another Moses, the code of laws which becomes the basis of all
subsequent legislation; he holds frequent and familiar intercourse with
God, and, once in every nine years, he goes up to the Dictæan cave of
the Bull-God 'to converse with Zeus,' to receive new commandments,
and to give account of his stewardship during the intervening period.
Finally, at the close of his life, he is transferred to the underworld, and
the great human lawgiver becomes the judge of the dead in Hades.
That is one side of the Minos legend, perhaps the most ancient; but
along with it there exists another group of stories of a very different
character, so different as to lend colour to the suggestion that we are
now dealing, not with the individual Minos who first gave the name its
vogue, but with a successor or successors in the same title. The Minos
who is most familiar to us in Greek story is not so much the lawgiver
and priest of God as the great sea-King and tyrant, the overlord of the
Ægean, whose vengeance was defeated by the bravery of the Athenian
hero, Theseus. From this point of view, Minos was the first of men who
recognized the importance of sea-power, and used it to establish the
supremacy of his island kingdom. 'The first person known to us as
having established a navy,' says Thucydides, 'is Minos. He made
himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over
the Cyclades, into most of which he sent