Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/251

 KRETAN LEGENDS. -MINOS AND HIS FAMILY. 219 born in Krete. Minos is the father of Deukalion, whose son Idomeneus, in conjunction with Meriones, conducts the Kretan troops to the host of Agamemnon before Troy. Minos is ruler of Knossus, and familiar companion of the great Zeus. He is spoken of as holding guardianship in Krete not necessarily meaning the whole of the island : he is farther decorated with a golden sceptre, and constituted judge over the dead in the under- world to settle their disputes, in which function Odysseus finds him this however by a passage of comparatively late interpola- tion into the Odyssey. He also had a daughter named Ariadne, for whom the artist Daedalus fabricated in the town of Knossus the representation of a complicated dance, and who was ultimate- ly carried off by Theseus : she died in the island of Dia, de- serted by Theseus and betrayed by Dionysos to the fatal wrath of Artemis. Rhadamanthus seems to approach to Minos both in judicial functions and posthumous dignity. He is conveyed expressly to Eubce, by the semi-divine sea-carriers the Phaea- cians, to inspect the gigantic corpse of the earth-born Tityus the longest voyage they ever undertook. He is moreover aftei death promoted to an abode of undisturbed bliss in the Elysiar plain at the extremity of the earth. 1 According to poets later than Homer, Europe is brought over by Zeus from Phoenicia to Krete, where she bears to him three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. The latter leaves Krete and settles in Lykia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions of Asia Minor, is connected by va- still shown, hard by a fountain at Goctyn in Krete, in the time of Theophras- tus : it was said to be the only plane-tree in the neighborhood which never cast its leaves (Theophrast. Hist. Plant, i. 9). 'Homer, Iliad, xiii. 249,450; xiv. 321. Odyss. xi. 322-568; xix. 179; iv. 564-vii. 321. The Homeric Minos in the under-world is not a judge of the previous lives of the dead, so as to determine whether they deserve reward or pun- ishment for their conduct on earth : such functions arc not assigned to him earlier than the time of Plato. He administers justice q.mong the dead, who are conceived as a sort of society, requiring some presiding judge : -&e^ia- revovTci venveaai, with regard to Minos, is said very much like (Odyss. xi. 484^ viiv <5' avTE [leya KpaTeeif veKveaa with regard to Achilles. See this matter partially illustrated in Heync's Excursus xi. to the sixth book of the of Virgil.