The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 4

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 Id?an or the Dict?an 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 Dict?an 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 "C?sar," 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 Dict?an 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 ?gean, 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 the first colonies, expelling the Carians, and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.' To Herodotus also, Minos, though obviously a shadowy figure, is the first great Thalassokrat. 'Polykrates is the first of the Grecians of whom we know who formed a design to