3. The characteristic epithet ὀλοόφρων; as also its relation to the
other Homeric personages with whose name it is joined.
4. The fact that Minos brought a more advanced form of laws and polity
among a people of lower social organization; the proof thus given that
he belonged to a superior race: the probability that, if this race
had been Hellenic, Homer would have distinctly marked the connection
of so distinguished a person with the Hellenic stem: and the apparent
certainty that, if not Hellenic, it could only be Phœnician.
The positive Homeric grounds for believing Minos to be Phœnician are
much stronger, than any that sustain the same belief in the case of
Cadmus: and the negative objection, that Homer does not call him by
the name of the country from which he sprang, is in fact an indication
of the Poet’s uniform practice of drawing the curtain over history or
legend, at the point where a longer perspective would have the effect
of exhibiting any Greek hero as derived from a foreign source, and thus
of confuting that claim to autochthonism which, though it is not much
his way to proclaim such matters in the abstract, yet appears to have
operated with Homer as a practical principle of considerable weight.