CHAPTER I

Produced by Robert J. Hall

[Illustration I: THE THRONE OF MINOS (_p_. 72)]

THE SEA-KINGS

OF CRETE

BY REV. JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.

WITH 32 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

SECOND EDITION

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1913

TO MY SISTERS AND MY BROTHERS

PREFACE

The object aimed at in the following pages has been to offer to

the general reader a plain account of the wonderful investigations

which have revolutionized all ideas as to the antiquity and the

level of the earliest European culture, and to endeavour to make

intelligible the bearing and significance of the results of these

investigations. In the hope that the extraordinary resurrection

of the first European civilization may appeal to a more extended

constituency than that of professed students of ancient origins,

the book has been kept as free as possible from technicalities

and the discussion of controverted points; and throughout I have

endeavoured to write for those who, while from their school days

they have loved the noble and romantic story of Ancient Greece,

have been denied the opportunity of a more thorough study of it

than comes within the limits of an ordinary education.

In the first chapter this standpoint may seem to have been unduly

emphasized, and the retelling of the ancient legends may be accounted

mere surplusage. Such, no doubt, it will be to some readers, but

perhaps they may be balanced by others whose recollection of the

great stories of Classic Greece has grown a little faint with the

lapse of years, and who are not unwilling to have it prompted again.

Reference to the legends was in any case unavoidable, since one

of the most remarkable results of the explorations has been the

disclosure of the solid basis of historic fact on which they rested;

and, if the book was to accomplish its purpose for the readers

for whom it was designed, reference seemed almost necessarily to

involve retelling.

I have to acknowledge extensive obligations to the writings and

reports of the various investigators who have accomplished so wonderful

a resurrection of this ancient world. My debt to the works of Dr.

A. J. Evans will be manifest to all who have any acquaintance with

the subject; but to such authors as Mrs. H. B. Hawes, Dr. Mackenzie,

Professors Burrows, Murray, and Browne, and Messrs. D. G. Hogarth

and H. R. Hall, to name only a few among many, my obligations are

only less than to the acknowledged chief of Cretan explorers.

To the Rev. James Kennedy, D.D., librarian of the New College,

Edinburgh, and to the Rev. C. J. M. Middleton, M.A., Crailing,

my thanks are due for invaluable help afforded in the collection

of material, and I have been not less indebted to Mr. A. Brown,

Galashiels, and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden, Edinburgh,

and others, for their assistance in the preparation of the

illustrations. To Mr. A. Brown in particular are due plates II.,

III., IV., V., IX., X., XV., XVI., XX., XXIII., XXIV., and XXV.;

and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden Plates I., VII.,

VIII., XI., XII., XVII. (I), and XXI. I have to record my hearty

thanks to the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic

Studies for the use of Plates XXIX. and XXX., reproduced by their

permission from the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_; to the Committee

of the British School at Athens for the use of Plate XIX. and the

plan of Knossos from their _Annual_; and to Dr. A. J. Evans and

Mr. John Murray for Plates VI., XIII., and XIV., from the _Monthly

Review_, March, 1901. For the redrawing and adaptation of the plan

of Knossos I am indebted to Mr. H. Baikie, B.Sc., Edinburgh, and

for the sketch-map of Crete to my wife.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE LEGENDS

CHAPTER II

THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER III

SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK

CHAPTER IV

THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'

CHAPTER V

THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'--_continued_

CHAPTER VI

PHÆSTOS, HAGIA TRIADA, AND EASTERN CRETE

CHAPTER VII

CRETE AND EGYPT

CHAPTER VIII

THE DESTROYERS

CHAPTER IX

THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE

CHAPTER X

LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS

CHAPTER XI

LETTERS AND RELIGION

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE

I. The Throne of Minos

II. (1) The Ramp, Troy, Second City; (2) the Circle-Graves, Mycenæ

III. Wall of Sixth City, Troy

IV. The Lion Gate, Mycenæ

V. (1) Vaulted Passage in Wall, Tiryns; (2) Beehive Tomb

(Treasury of Atreus), Mycenæ

VI. The Cup-Bearer, Knossos

VII. The Long Gallery, Knossos

VIII. A Magazine with Jars and Kaselles, Knossos

IX. (1) Magazine with Jars and Kaselles; (2) Great Jar with

Trickle Ornament

X. (1) Part of Dolphin Fresco; (2) A Great Jar, Knossos

XI. Pillar of the Double Axes

XII. (1) Minoan Paved Road; (2) North Entrance, Knossos

XIII. Relief of Bull's Head

XIV. Clay Tablet with Linear Script, Knossos

XV. (1) Palace Wall, West Side, Mount Juktas in Background;

(2) Bathroom, Knossos

XVI. A Flight of the Quadruple Staircase; (2) Wall with Drain

XVII. (1) Hall of the Double Axes; (2) Great Staircase, Knossos

XVIII. The King's Gaming-Board

XIX. Ivory Figurines

XX. (1) Main Drain, Knossos; (2) Terra-cotta Drain-Pipes

XXI. Theatral Area, Knossos: Before Restoration

XXII. Theatral Area, Knossos: Restored

XXIII. Great Jar with Papyrus Reliefs

XXIV. The Royal Villa: (1) The Basilica; (2) Stone Lamp

XXV. (1) Knossos Valley; (2) Excavating at Knossos

XXVI. Great Staircase, Phæstos

XXVII. The Harvester Vase, Hagia Triada

XXVIII. Sarcophagus from Hagia Triada

XXIX. Minoan Pottery

XXX. Late Minoan Vase from Mycenæ

XXXI. Kamares Vases from Phæstos and Hagia Triada

XXXII. Goldsmiths' Work from Beehive Tombs, Phæstos

SKETCH MAP OF CRETE

PLAN OF KNOSSOS

[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF CRETE To Illustrate THE SEA KINGS OF

CRETE BY The Rev. James Baikie, F.R.A.S.]

THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE

AND THE

PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION OF GREECE

CHAPTER I

THE LEGENDS

The resurrection of the prehistoric age of Greece, and the disclosure

of the astonishing standard of civilization which had been attained

on the mainland and in the isles of the Ægean at a period at least

2,000 years earlier than that at which Greek history, as hitherto

understood, begins, may be reckoned as among the most interesting

results of modern research into the relics of the life of past

ages. The present generation has witnessed remarkable discoveries in

Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither Niffur nor Abydos disclosed a

world so entirely new and unexpected as that which has been revealed

by the work of Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenæ, and

Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other explorers--Italian,

British, and American--in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian

discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already

been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans

revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been

believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious

that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner

of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were

matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearance, likely to remain

so. An abundant wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes,

of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and

the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends

were manifestly largely imaginative--deities and demi-gods, men

and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane--and

it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid

ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ancient

stories first rested.

For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek

history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the

story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of

the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful

form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated

with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit,

but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course,

their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative

projections upon the past of the culture of the writer's own period

or periods. Beyond that lay the great waste land of legend, in

which gods and godlike heroes moved and enacted their romances

among 'Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire.' What proportion of

fact, if any, lay in the stories of Minos, the great lawgiver,

and his war fleet, and his Labyrinth, with its monstrous occupant;

of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur; of Dædalus, the first

aeronaut, and his wonderful works of art and science; or of any

other of the thousand and one beautiful or tragic romances of ancient

Hellas, to attempt to determine this lay utterly beyond the sphere

of the serious historian. 'To analyze the fables,' says Grote, 'and

to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to

me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic

inventions, and the items of matter of fact, _if any such there

be_, must for ever remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet

originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his

auditors.... It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic

that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhiphæan

Mountains would in time reach the delicious country and genial

climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of

Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts

of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches

up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land

ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less

illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean

elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents fairly

well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths

were beautiful, but their value was not in any sense historical;

it arose from the light which they cast upon the workings of the

active Greek mind, and the revelation which they gave of the innate

poetic faculty which created myths so far excelling those of any

other nation.

Within the last forty years all this has been changed. Opinions

like that so dogmatically expressed by our great historian are

no longer held by anyone who has followed the current of modern

investigations, and remain only as monuments of the danger of

dogmatizing on matters concerning which all preconceived ideas

may be upset by the results of a single season's spade-work on

some ancient site; and he would be a bold man who would venture

to-day to call 'illusory' the search for 'points of solid truth'

in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of matter of fact,

if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of romantic

inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course, is by

no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well

begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian

conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of

a great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization,

which neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has

any cause to shrink from comparison with the great historic

civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the

process of disentangling the historic nucleus of the legends from

their merely mythical and romantic elements cannot yet be undertaken

with any approach to certainty, it is becoming continually more

apparent, not only that in many cases there was such a nucleus,

but also what were some of the historic elements around which the

poetic fancy of later times drew the fanciful wrappings of the

heroic tales as we know them. It is not yet possible to trace and

identify the actual figures of the heroes of prehistoric Greece:

probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet untranslated

Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient Herodotus,

and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but there

can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and women

of Ægean stock filled the rôles of these ancient romances, and

that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the

record of actual achievements.

In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important

and convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete.

The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the

nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencæ,

Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to

the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all

probability the original of, that which is described for us in the

Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and

Phæstos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that

it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenæan civilization

was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture,

whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been

in Crete. And it has been in Crete that exploration and discovery

have led to the most striking illustration of many of the statements

in the legends and traditions, and have made it practically certain

that much of what used to be considered mere romantic fable represents,

with, of course, many embellishments of fancy, a good deal of historic

fact.

Our first task, therefore, is to gather together the main features

of what the ancient legends of Greece narrated about Crete and its

inhabitants, and their relations to the rest of the Ægean world.

The position of Crete--'a halfway house between three continents,

flanked by the great Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller island

stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'--marks

it out as designed by Nature to be a centre of development in the

culture of the early Ægean race, and, in point of fact, ancient

traditions unanimously pointed to the great island as being the

birthplace of Greek civilization. The most ambitious tradition

boldly transcended the limits of human occupation, and gave to

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 Idæan or the Dictæan

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 Dictæan 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

"Cæsar," 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 Dictæan

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 Ægean, 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 make himself master of the sea, except Minos the Knossian.'

But the evidence for the existence of this early Sea-King and his

power rests on surer grounds than the vague tradition recorded by

the two great historians. The power of Minos has left its imprint

in unmistakable fashion in the places which were called by his

name. Each of the Minoas which appear so numerously on the coasts

of the Mediterranean, from Sicily on the west to Gaza on the east,

marks a spot where the King or Kings who bore the name of Minos

once held a garrison or a trading-station, and their number shows

how wide-reaching was the power of the Cretan sea-Kings.

But the great King was by no means so fortunate in his domestic

relationships as in his foreign adventures. The domestic skeleton

in his case was the composite monster the Minotaur, half man, half

bull, fabled to have been the fruit of a monstrous passion on the

part of the King's wife, Pasiphae. This monster was kept shut up

within a vast and intricate building called the Labyrinth, contrived

for Minos by his renowned artificer, Dædalus. Further, when his own

son, Androgeos, had gone to Athens to contend in the Panathenaic

games, having overcome all the other Greeks in the sports, he fell

a victim to the suspicion of Ægeus, the King of Athens, who caused

him to be slain, either by waylaying him on the road to Thebes,

or by sending him against the Marathonian bull. In his sorrow and

righteous anger, Minos, who had already conquered Megara by the

treachery of Scylla, raised a great fleet, and levied war upon

Athens; and, having wasted Attica with fire and sword, he at length

reduced the land to such straits that King Ægeus and his Athenians

were glad to submit to the hard terms which were asked of them.

The demand of Minos was that every ninth year Athens should send

him as tribute seven youths and seven maidens. These were selected

by lot, or, according to another version of the legend, chosen by

Minos himself, and on their arrival in Crete were cast into the

Labyrinth, to become the prey of the monstrous Minotaur.

The first and second instalments of this ghastly tribute had already

been paid; but when the time of the third tribute was drawing nigh,

the predestined deliverer of Athens appeared in the person of the

hero Theseus. Theseus was the unacknowledged son of King Ægeus

and the Princess Aithra of Trœzen. He had been brought up by his

mother at Trœzen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out

to make his way to the Court of Ægeus and secure acknowledgment

as the rightful son of the Athenian King. The legend tells how on

his way to Athens he cleared the lands through which he journeyed

of the pests which had infested them. Sinnis, the pine-bender,

who tied his miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent

towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back,

the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon,

the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes,

who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed,

stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the

over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other

plagues of society were abated by the young hero. Not long after

his arrival at Athens and acknowledgment by his father, the time

came round when the Minoan heralds should come to Athens to claim

the victims for the Minotaur. Seeing the grief that prevailed in

the city, and the anger of the people against his father, Ægeus,

whom they accounted the cause of their misfortune, Theseus determined

that, if possible, he would make an end of this humiliation and

misery, and accordingly offered himself as one of the seven youths

who were to be devoted to the Minotaur. Ægeus was loth to part with

his newly-found son, but at length he consented to the venture;

and it was agreed that if Theseus succeeded in vanquishing the

Minotaur and bringing back his comrades in safety, he should hoist

white sails on his returning galley instead of the black ones which

she had always borne in token of her melancholy mission.

So at length the sorrowful ship came to the harbour in the bay below

broad Knossos where Minos reigned, and when the King had viewed

his captives they were cast into prison to await their dreadful

doom. But fair-haired Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, had marked

Theseus as he stood before the King, and love to him had risen

up in her heart, and pity at the thought of his fate; and so by

night she came to his dungeon, and when she could not persuade

him to save himself by flight, because that he had sworn to kill

the Minotaur and save his companions, she gave him a clue of thread

by which he might be able to retrace his way through all the dark

and winding passages of the Labyrinth, and a sword wherewith to

deal with the Minotaur when he encountered him. So Theseus was

led away by the guards, and put into the Labyrinth to meet his

fate; and he went on, with the clue which he had fastened to his

arm unwinding itself as he passed through passage after passage,

until at last he met the dreadful monster; and there, in the depths

of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, who had slain so many, was himself

slain. Then Theseus and his companions escaped, taking Ariadne

with them, and fled to their black ship, and set sail for Attica

again; and landing for awhile in the island of Naxos, Ariadne there

became the hero's wife. But she never came to Athens with Theseus,

but was either deserted by him in Naxos, or, as some say, was taken

from him there by force. So, without her, Theseus sailed again

for Athens. But in their excitement at the hope of seeing once

more the home they had thought to have looked their last upon, he

and his companions forgot to hoist the white sail; and old Ægeus,

straining his eyes on Sunium day after day for the returning ship,

saw her at last come back black-winged as he had feared; and in

his grief he fell, or cast himself, into the sea, and so died, and

thus the sea is called the Ægean to this day. Another tradition,

recorded by the poet Bacchylides, tells how Theseus, at the challenge

of Minos, descended to the palace of Amphitrite below the sea, and

brought back with him the ring, 'the splendour of gold,' which

the King had thrown into the deep.

So runs the great story which links Minos and Crete with the favourite

hero of Athens. But other legends, not so famous nor so romantic, carry

on the story of the great Cretan King to a miserable close. Dædalus,

his famous artificer, was also an Athenian, and the most cunning of

all men. To him was ascribed the invention of the plumb-line and

the auger, the wedge and the level; and it was he who first set

masts in ships and bent sails upon them. But having slain, through

jealousy, his nephew Perdix, who promised to excel him in skill, he

was forced to flee from Athens, and so came to the Court of Minos.

For the Cretan King he wrought many wonderful works, rearing for him

the Labyrinth, and the Choros, or dancing-ground, which, as Homer

tells us, he 'wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.'

But for his share in the great crime of Pasiphae Minos hated him,

and shut him up in the Labyrinth which he himself had made. Then

Dædalus made wings for himself and his son Icarus, and fastened

them with wax, and together the two flew from their prison-house

high above the pursuit of the King's warfleet. But Icarus flew too

near the sun, and the wax that fastened his wings melted, and he

fell into the sea. So Dædalus alone came safely to Sicily, and was

there hospitably received by King Kokalos of Kamikos, for whom, as

for Minos, he executed many marvellous works. Then Minos, still

thirsting for revenge, sailed with his fleet for Kamikos, to demand

the surrender of Dædalus; and Kokalos, affecting willingness to

give up the fugitive, received Minos with seeming friendship, and

ordered the bath to be prepared for his royal guest. But the three

daughters of the Sicilian King, eager to protect Dædalus, drowned

the Cretan in the bath, and so he perished miserably. And many of

the men who had sailed with him remained in Sicily, and founded

there a town which they named Minoa, in memory of their murdered

King.

[Illustration II: (1) THE RAMP, TROY, SECOND CITY (_p_. 38)

(2) THE CIRCLE GRAVES, MYCENÆ (_p_. 43)]

Herodotus has preserved for us another echo of the story of Minos

in the shape of the reasons which led the Cretans to refuse aid to

the rest of the Greeks during the Persian invasion. The Delphian

oracle, which 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, was the Moon; and

the Labyrinth was the tower on whose walls the astronomers of the

day traced the wanderings of the heavenly bodies, 'an image of

the starry heaven, with its infinitely winding paths, in which,

nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely move about.' Among

rationalizing explanations this must surely hold the palm for

cumbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful that the explorer's

spade has demolished it along with other theories, and given back

to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance such

as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.