Minos And His Brothers

WHEN Zeus left Europe, after having lathered Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon on her in Crete, she married Asterius, the reigning king, whose father Tectamus son of Dorus had brought a mixed colony of Aeolian and Pelasgian settlers to the island and there married a daughter of Cretheus the Aeolian.
b. This marriage proving childless, Asterius adopted Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon, and made them his heirs. But when the brothers grew to manhood, they quarrelled for the love of a beautiful boy named Miletus, begotten by Apollo on the Nymph Areia, whom some call Deione, and others, Theia. Miletus having decided that he liked Sarpedon best, was driven from Crete by Minos, and sailed with a large fleet to Caria in Asia Minor, where he founded the city and kingdom of Miletus. For the previous two generations, this country, then called Anactoria, had been ruled by the giant Anax, a son of Uranus and Mother Earth, and by his equally gigantic son Asterius. The skeleton of Asterius, whom Miletus killed and afterwards buried on an islet lying off Lade, has lately been disenterred; it is at least ten cubits long. Some, however, say that Minos suspected Miletus of plotting to overthrow him and seize the kingdom; but that he feared Apollo, and therefore refrained from doing more than warn Miletus, who fled to Caria of his own accord. Others say that the boy who occasioned the quarrel was not Miletus but one Atymnius, a son of Zeus and Cassiopeia, or of Phoenix.

c. After Asterius’s death, Minos claimed the Cretan throne and, 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
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.
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 m 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.
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.

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.
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 punishment of evildoers, he legislated both for the Cretans and for the islanders of Asia Minor, many of whom voluntarily adopted judicial code. Every ninth year,  he would visit Zeus’s cave and bring back a hew set of laws, a custom afterwards followed by his brother Minos. 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. 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.

i. Rhadamanthys eventually fled to Boeotia because he had killed 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. 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.

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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 BC; 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. 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, 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 BC, 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 matrilineal descent (Herodotus; Strabo), like the Carians. 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’.
3. The gigantic rulers of Anactoria recall the Anakim of Genesis, giants (Joshua) 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), and may be identified with Phoroneus. These Anakim seem to have come from Greece, as members of the Sea-peoples’  confederation which caused the Egyptians so much trouble in the fourteenth century BC. Lade, the burial place of Anax’s son Asterius, was probably so called in honour of the goddess Lat, Leto, or Latona, and that this Asterius bears the same name as Minos’s father suggests that the Milesians brought it with them from the Cretan Miletus. According to a plausible tradition in, the Irish Book Invasions, the Irish Milesians originated in Crete, fled to Syria by way Asia Minor, and thence sailed west in the thirteenth century BC to Gaetulia in North Africa, and finally reached Ireland by way of Brigantium (Compostela, in North-western Spain).
4. Miletus’s claim to be Apollo’s son suggests that the Milesian kings were given solar attributes, like those of Corinth.
5. The triumph of Minos, son of Zeus, over his brothers refers to the Dorians’ eventual mastery of Crete, but it was Poseidon to whom Minos sacrificed the bull, which again suggests that the earlier holders of the title ‘Minos’ were Aeolians. Crete had for centuries been a very rich country and, in the late eighth century BC, was shared between the Achaeans, Dorians, Pelasgians, Cydonians (Aeolians), and in the far west of the island, ‘true Cretans’ (Odyssey). Diodorus Siculus tried to distinguish Minos son of Zeus from his grandson, Minos son of Lycastus; but two or three Minos dynasties may have successively reigned in Cnossus.
6. Sarpedon’s name (‘rejoicing in a wooden ark’) suggests that he brought with him to Lycia the ritual of the Sun-hero who, at New Year, makes his annual reappearance as a child floating in an ark-like Moses, Perseus, Anius, and others. A Cretan connection with the Perseus myth is provided by Pasiphaë’s mother Perseis. Zeus’s concession to Sarpedon, that he should live for three generations, means perhaps that instead of the usual eight years-a Great Year-which was the length of Minos’s reign, he was allowed to keep his throne until the nineteenth year, when a closer synchronization of solar and lunar time occurred than at the end of eight; and thus broke into the third Great Year.
7. Since ‘Pasiphaë’, according to Pausanias, is a title of the Moon; and ‘Itone’, her other name, a title of Athene as rain-maker (Pausanias), the myth of Pasiphaë and the bull points to a ritual marriage under an oak between the Moon-priestess, wearing cow’s horns, and the Minos-king, wearing a bull’s mask. According to Hesychius (sub Carten), ‘Gortys’ stands for Carten, the Cretan word for a cow; and the marriage seems to have been understood as one between Sun and Moon, since there was a herd of cattle sacred to the Sun in Gortys (Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues). Daedalus’s discreet retirement from the meadow suggests that this was not consummated publicly in the Pictish or Moesynoechian style. Many later Greeks disliked the Pasiphaë myth, and preferred to believe that she had an affair not with a bull, but with a man called Taurus (Plutarch: Theseus; Palaephatus). White bulls, which were peculiarly sacred to the Moon, figured in the annual sacrifice on the Alban mount at Rome, in the cult of Thracian Dionysus, in the mistletoe-and-oak ritual of the Gallic Druids and, according to the Book of the Dun Cow, in the divinatory rites which preceded an ancient Irish coronation.
8. Minos’s palace at Cnossus was a complex of rooms, ante-rooms, halls, and corridors in which a country visitor might easily lose his way. Sir Arthur Evans suggests that this was the Labyrinth, so called from the labrys, or double-headed axe; a familiar emblem of Cretan sovereignty shaped like a waxing and a waning moon joined together back to back, and symbolizing the creative as well as the destructive power of the goddess. But the maze at Cnossus had a separate existence from the palace: it was a true maze, in the Hampton Court sense, and seems to have been marked out in mosaic on a pavement as a ritual dancing  pattern -a pattern which occurs in places as far apart as Wales and North-eastern Russia, for use in the Easter maze-dance. This dance was performed in Italy (Pliny: Natural History), and in Troy (Scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache), and seems to have been introduced into Britain, towards the end of the third millennium BC, by Neolithic immigrant from North Africa. Homer describes the Cnossus maze (Iliad): ‘Daedalus in Cnossus once contrived a dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne’; and Lucian refers to popular dances in Crete connected with Ariadne and the Labyrinth (On the Dance).

9. The cult of Rhadamanthys may have been brought from Boeotia to Crete, and not contrariwise. Haliartus, where he had a hero-shrine, was apparently sacred to the ‘White Goddess of Bread’, namely Demeter, for Halia, ‘of the sea’, was a title of the Moon as Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess’ (Diodorus Siculus), and artos means ‘bread’. Alcmene (‘strong in wrath’) is another Moon-title. Though said to be Cretan word, Rhadamanthys may stand for Rhabdomantis, ‘divining with wand’, a name taken from the reed-bed at Haliartus, where his spirits stirred the tops oracularly. If so, the tradition of his having legislated for all Crete and the islands of Asia Minor will mean that similar oracle in Crete was consulted at the beginning of each new reign, and that its pronouncements carried authority wherever Cretan weights, measures, and trading conventions were accepted. He is called a son of Zeus, rather than of Hephaestus, doubtless because the Rhadamanthine oracles came from the Dictaean Cave, sacred to Zeus.
10. At Petsofa in Crete a hoard of human heads and limbs, of clay, have been found, each with a hole through which a string could be passed. If once fixed to wooden trunks, they may have formed part of Daedalus’s jointed dolls, and represented the Fertility-goddess. Their use was perhaps to hang from a fruit-tree, with their limbs moving about in the wind, to ensure good crops. Such a doll is shown hanging from a fruit-tree in the famous gold ring from the Acropolis Treasure at Mycenae. Tree worship is the subject of several Minoan works of art, and Ariadne, the Cretan goddess, is said to have hanged herself, as the Attic Erigone did. Artemis the Hanged One, who had a sanctuary at Condyleia in Arcadia (Pausanias), and Helen of the Trees, who had a sanctuary at Rhodes and is said to have been hanged by Polyxo (Pausanias), may be variants of the same goddess.