he early AEgean 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 Idaean or the Dictaean
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 Dictaean 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,'