says Professor Murray, 'that Minos was a name, like "Pharaoh" or
"Caesar," 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 Dictaean
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 AEgean, 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 rest