The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (68 page)

c
. After Asterius’s death, Minos claimed the Cretan throne and, in
proof of his right to reign, boasted that the gods would answer whatever prayer he offered them. First dedicating an altar to Poseidon, and making all preparations for a sacrifice, he then prayed that a bull might emerge from the sea. At once, a dazzlingly white bull swam ashore, but Minos was so struck by its beauty that he sent it to join his own herds, and slaughtered another instead. Minos’s claim to the throne was accepted by every Cretan, except Sarpedon who, still grieving for Miletus, declared that it had been Asterius’s intention to divide the kingdom equally between his three heirs; and, indeed, Minos himself had already divided the island into three parts, and chosen a capital for each.
⁵

d
. Expelled from Crete by Minos, Sarpedon fled to Cilicia in Asia Minor, where he allied himself with Cilix against the Milyans, conquered them, and became their king. Zeus granted him the privilege of living for three generations; and when he finally died, the Milyan kingdom was called Lycia, after his successor Lycus, who had taken refuge with him upon being banished from Athens by Aegeus.
⁶

e
. Meanwhile, Minos had married Pasiphaë, a daughter of Helius and the nymph Crete, otherwise known as Perseis. But Poseidon, to avenge the affront offered him by Minos, made Pasiphaë fall in love with the white bull which had been withheld from sacrifice. She confided her unnatural passion to Daedalus, the famous Athenian craftsman, who now lived in exile at Cnossus, delighting Minos and his family with the animated wooden dolls he carved for them. Daedalus promised to help her, and built a hollow wooden cow, which he upholstered with a cow’s hide, set on wheels concealed in its hooves, and pushed into the meadow near Gortys, where Poseidon’s bull was grazing under the oaks among Minos’s cows. Then, having shown Pasiphaë how to open the folding doors in the cow’s back, and slip inside with her legs thrust down into its hindquarters, he discreetly retired. Soon the white bull ambled up and mounted the cow, so that Pasiphaë had all her desire, and later gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’s head and a human body.
⁷

f
. But some say that Minos, having annually sacrificed to Poseidon the best bull in his possession, withheld his gift one year, and sacrificed merely the next best; hence Poseidon’s wrath; others say that it was Zeus whom he offended; others again, that Pasiphaë had failed for several years to propitiate Aphrodite, who now punished her with this monstrous lust. Afterwards, the bull grew savage and devastated the
whole of Crete, until Heracles captured and brought it to Greece where it was eventually killed by Theseus.
⁸

g
. Minos consulted an oracle to know how he might best avoid scandal and conceal Pasiphaë’s disgrace. The response was: ‘Instruct Daedalus to build you a retreat at Cnossus!’ This Daedalus did, and Minos spent the remainder of his life in the inextricable maze called the Labyrinth, at the very heart of which he concealed Pasiphaë and the Minotaur.
⁹

h
. Rhadamanthys, wiser than Sarpedon, remained in Crete; he lived at peace with Minos, and was awarded a third part of Asterius’s dominions. Renowned as a just and upright law-giver, inexorable in his punishment of evildoers, he legislated both for the Cretans and for the islanders of Asia Minor, many of whom voluntarily adopted his judicial code. Every ninth year, he would visit Zeus’s cave and bring back a new set of laws, a custom afterwards followed by his brother Minos.
¹⁰
But some deny that Rhadamanthys was Minos’s brother, and call him a son of Hephaestus; as others deny that Minos was Zeus’s son, making him the son of Lycastus and the nymph of Ida. He bequeathed land in Crete to his son Gortys, after whom the Cretan city is named, although the Tegeans insist that Gortys was an Arcadian, the son of Tegeates.
¹¹
Rhadamanthys also bequeathed land in Asia Minor to his son Erythrus; and the island of Chios to Oenopion, the son of Ariadne, whom Dionysus first taught how to make wine; and Lemnos to Thoas, another of Ariadne’s sons: and Cournos to Enyues; and Peparethos to Staphylus; and Maroneia to Euanthes; and Paros to Alcaeus; and Delos to Anius; and Andros to Andrus.
¹²

i
. Rhadamanthys eventually fled to Boeotia because he had killed a kinsman, and lived there in exile at Ocaleae, where he married Alcmene, Heracles’s mother, after the death of Amphitryon. His tomb, and that of Alcmene, are shown at Haliartus, close to a plantation of the tough canes brought from Crete, from which javelins and flutes are cut. But some say that Alcmene was married to Rhadamanthys in the Elysian Fields, after her death.
¹³
For Zeus had appointed him one of the three Judges of the Dead; his colleagues were Minos and Aeacus, and he resided in the Elysian Fields.
¹⁴

1
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 80.

2
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Apollodorus: iii. 1. 2; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
ix. 442; Antoninus Liberalis:
Transformations
30.

3
. Pausanias: vii. 2. 3 and i. 35. 5; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
ix. 436 ff.

4
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 178.

5
. Strabo: x. 4. 8.

6
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit.
; Herodotus: i. 173.

7
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: vii. 4. 5; Virgil:
Eclogues
vi. 5 ff.; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
. and iii. 1. 3–4.

8
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 77.2 and 13.4; First Vatican Mythographer: 47; Hyginus:
Fabula
40 [
but the text is corrupt
].

9
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
viii. 155 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 1. 4.

10
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 79; Apollodorus: iii. 1.2; Strabo;
loc. cit
.

11
. Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: viii. 53. 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Pausanias: viii. 53. 2.

12
. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 997; Diodorus Siculus: v. 79. 1–2.

13
. Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
50; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 11; Plutarch:
Lysander
28; Strabo: ix. 11. 30; Pherecydes, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis:
Transformations
33.

14
. Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Homer:
Odyssey
iv. 564.

1
. Sir Arthur Evans’s classification of successive periods of pre-Classical Cretan Culture as Minoan I, II, and III suggests that the ruler of Crete was already called Minos in the early third millennium
B
.
C
.; but this is misleading. Minos seems to have been the royal title of an Hellenic dynasty which ruled Crete early in the second millennium, each king ritually marrying the Moon-priestess of Cnossus and taking his title of ‘Moon-being’ from her. Minos is anachronistically made the successor of Asterius the grandson of Dorus, whereas the Dorians did not invade Crete until the close of the second millennium. It is more likely that the Aeolians and Pelasgians (perhaps including ‘Ionians from Attica’) brought in by Tectamus (‘craftsman’) – a name which identifies him with Daedalus, and with Hephaestus, Rhadamanthys’s alleged father – were Minos’s original companions; and that Asterius (‘starry’) is a masculinization of Asterië, the goddess as Queen of Heaven and creatrix of the planetary powers (see
1.
d
).
Crete
itself is a Greek word, a form of
crateia
, ‘strong, or ruling, goddess’ – hence Creteus, and Cretheus. Messrs M. Ventris and J. Chadwick’s recent researches into the hitherto undeciphered Linear Script B, examples of which have been found at Pylus, Thebes, and Mycenae, as well as among the ruins of the Cnossian palace sacked in 1400
B
.
C
., show that the official language at Cnossus in the middle of the second millennium was an early form of Aeolic Greek. The script seems to have been originally invented for use with a non-Aryan language and adapted to Greek with some difficulty. (Whether inscriptions in Linear Script A are written in Greek or Cretan has not yet been established.) A great number of names from Greek mythology occur in both Cretan and
mainland tablets, among them: Achilles, Idomeneus, Theseus, Cretheus, Nestor, Ephialtes, Xuthus, Ajax, Glaucus, and Aeolus – which suggests that many of these myths date back beyond the Fall of Troy.

2
. Since Miletus is a masculine name, the familiar myth of two brothers who quarrel for the favours of a woman was given a homosexual turn. The truth seems to be that, during a period of disorder following the Achaean sack of Cnossus in about 1400
B
.
C
., numerous Greek-speaking Cretan aristocrats of Aeolo-Pelasgian or Ionian stock, for whom the Moon-goddess was the supreme deity, migrated with their native dependants to Asia Minor, especially to Caria, Lycia, and Lydia; for, disregarding the tradition of Sarpedon’s dynasty in Lycia, Herodotus records that the Lycians of his time still reckoned by matrilinear descent (Herodotus: i. 173; Strabo: xii. 8. 5), like the Carians (see
75.
5
).
Miletos
may be a native Cretan word, or a transliteration of
milteios
, ‘the colour of red ochre, or red lead’; and therefore a synonym for Erythrus, or Phoenix, both of which mean ‘red’. Cretan complexions were redder than Hellenic ones, and the Lycians and Carians came of partly Cretan stock; as did the Puresati (Philistines), whose name also means ‘red men’ (see
38.
3
).

3
. The gigantic rulers of Anactoria recall the Anakim of
Genesis
, giants (
Joshua
xiv. 13) ousted by Caleb from the oracular shrine which had once belonged to Ephron the son of Heth (Tethys?). Ephron gave his name to Hebron (
Genesis
xxiii. 16), and may be identified with Phoroneus. These Anakim seem to have come from Greece, as members of the Sea-people’s confederation which caused the Egyptians so much trouble in the fourteenth century
B
.
C
. Lade, the burial place of Anax’s son Asterius, was probably so called in honour of the goddess Lat, Leto, or Latona (see
14.
2
), and that this Asterius bears the same name as Minos’s father suggests that the Milesians brought it with them from the Cretan Miletus (see
25.
6
). According to a plausible tradition in the Irish
Book of Invasions
, the Irish Milesians originated in Crete, fled to Syria by way of Asia Minor, and thence sailed west in the thirteenth century
B
.
C
. to Gaetulia in North Africa, and finally reached Ireland by way of Brigantium (Compostela, in North-western Spain).