The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 7

they consulted at this crisis, suggested to them that they had known
enough of the misery caused by foreign expeditions. 'Fools, you
complain of all the woes that Minos in his anger sent you, for aiding
Menelaus, because they would not assist you in avenging his death at
Kamikos, and yet you assisted them in avenging a woman who was
carried off from Sparta by a barbarian.' In commentary on this saying
Herodotus gives the explanation which was given to him by the
inhabitants of Præsos, in Crete. After the death of Minos, the Cretans,
with a great armada, invaded Sicily, and besieged Kamikos
ineffectually for five years; but finding themselves unable to continue
the siege, and being driven ashore on the Italian coast during their
retreat, they founded there the city of Hyria. Crete, being thus left
desolate, was repeopled by other tribes, 'especially the Grecians'; and in
the third generation after the death of Minos the new Cretan people sent
a contingent to help Agamemnon in the Trojan War, as a punishment
for which famine and pestilence fell on them, and the island was
depopulated a second time, so that the Cretans of the time of the
Persian invasion are the third race to inhabit the island. In this tradition
we may see a distorted reflection of the various vicissitudes which, as
we shall see later, appear to have befallen the Minoan kingdom, and of
the incursions which, after the fall of Knossos, gradually changed the
character of the island population.
Such, then, are the most familiar of the legends and traditions

associated with prehistoric Crete. Some of these, touching on the
personality of Minos and his relationship with Zeus, have their own
significance in connection with the little that is known of the Minoan
religion, and will fall to be discussed later from that point of view. The
famous story of Theseus and the Minotaur, though it, too, may have its
connection with the religious conceptions which gather round the name
of Minos, seems at first sight to move entirely in the realm of pure
romance. Yet the conviction of its reality was very strong with the
Athenians, and was indeed expressed in a ceremony which held its own
to a late stage in Athenian history. The ship in which Theseus was said
to pave made his voyage was preserved with the utmost care till at least
the beginning of the third century B.C., her timbers being constantly 'so
pieced and new-framed with strong plank that it afforded an example to
the philosophers in their disputations concerning the identity of things
that are changed by growth, some contending that it was the same, and
others that it was not.' It was this galley, or the vessel which tradition
affirmed to be the galley of Theseus, which was sent every year from
Athens to Delos with solemn sacrifices and specially nominated envoys.
One of her voyages has become for ever memorable owing to the fact
that the death of Socrates was postponed for thirty days because of the
galley's absence; for so great was the reverence in which this annual
ceremony was held that during the time of her voyage the city was
obliged to abstain from all acts carrying with them public impurity, so
that it was not lawful to put a condemned man to death until the galley
returned. The mere fact of such a tradition as that of the galley is at
least presumptive evidence that some historic ground lay behind a
belief so persistent, however the story may have been added to and
adorned with supernatural details by later imagination; and it is difficult
to see how Grote, on the very threshold of recounting the Athenians'
conviction about the ship, and their solemn sacrificial use of her,
should pause to reaffirm his unbelief in the existence of any historic
ground for the main feature of the legend--the tribute of human victims
paid by Athens to Crete.
[Illustration III: WALL OF SIXTH CITY, TROY (p. 41)]
Later Athenian writers of a rationalizing turn endeavoured to bring

down the noble old legend to the level of the commonplace by
transforming the Minotaur into a mere general or famous athlete named
Taurus, whom Theseus vanquished in Crete. But the rationalistic
version never found much favour, and the Athenian potter was always
sure of a market for his vases with pictures of the bull-headed Minotaur
falling to the sword of the national hero. No more fortunate has been
the German attempt to resolve the story of Minos and the Minotaur, the
Labyrinth and Pasiphae, into a clumsy solar myth. The whole legend of
the Minotaur, on this theory, was connected with the worship of the
heavenly host. The Minotaur was the Sun; Pasiphae, 'the very bright
one,' wife of Minos,