Appendix III. The migration of the Dorians to Crete.
Cnosus,[2151] the Minoian Cnosus, was, even so late as the time of Plato, the first city in Crete, and the chief domicile of the Cretan laws and customs: and Plato, in his Treatise on Laws, takes a Cnosian as the representative and defender of the Cretan laws in general;[2152] although Cnosus about his time had declined from internal corruption, and the fame of having preserved the good laws of ancient Crete soon passed from her to Gortyna and Lyctus.[2153] In earlier times, however, the Cretan laws (Κρητικοὶ νόμοι), which Archilochus even mentions as being of a distinct character,[2154] were preserved in the greatest purity at Cnosus. Now when modern writers admit indeed that the Cretan laws were founded upon the customs of the Doric race, but affirm that this race did not penetrate into Crete before the expedition of the Heraclidæ, and that migrations subsequently took place from Peloponnesus; it is necessary for them first of all to show that Cnosus received its Doric inhabitants from that country, that is, probably either from Argos or Sparta. But had such been the case, the memory of these migrations would assuredly never have been lost: Argos and Sparta would have been too proud to possess such a colony. Cnosus must therefore have received its Doric inhabitants at an earlier date, in the dark ages of mythology; and the subsequent colonies from Peloponnesus to Lyctus, Gortyna, and other places, helped to increase the Doric population, which in Homer's time[2155] was confined to a part of the island, over the whole of Crete; as was the case in [pg 494] late ages. And at the time which Homer describes, not only the language, but the customs and laws were probably also different; whereas Archilochus appears to mention the Cretan laws as prevalent over the whole island. Upon the whole, the Dorians in Crete—and this is a fact of great importance—never seem to stand, with regard to the Dorians of Peloponnesus, in the relation of a colony to its mother country. In Greece, the parent state—so great was the pride of higher antiquity—never condescended to take the institutions of a colony as models for its own, as was the case with Sparta and Crete; nor did the mother country ever procure priests from its colony, as was the case when the Pythian Apollo sent Cretan priests to Sparta.[2156] In short, everything seems to prove that the Doric institutions were of great antiquity in Crete, and that the distinction which has lately been taken between the laws of Minos and the Doric institutions and customs of Crete—a distinction directly opposed to the unanimous testimony of antiquity—is false and untenable.
But in retaining his conviction respecting a Doric settlement in Crete before the migration of the Heraclidæ, and in viewing it as the only means of explaining many facts in the religious and political history of the Greeks, the Author does not imply that this Doric colony was exactly similar to a later migration of Dorians from Argos and Sparta. The condition of the Dorians in Hestiæotis must have been very different from that to which the same race attained in Peloponnesus. The mixture with other races, which had gone so far, that the head of the mythical settlement bears a Pelasgic name (Teutamus), does not agree with the character of the later Dorians. At that time no line of princes, calling themselves Heraclidæ, could have stood at the head of the Dorians; for in Crete, Heraclidæ only occur in cities which were colonised from Peloponnesus; for example, they do not occur in Cnosus. Moreover, a maritime, and especially a piratical life (upon which the maritime supremacy [pg 495] of Minos was founded) does not agree with the principles followed by the Dorians in Peloponnesus, where they relied upon a tranquil and secure possession of land. These principles, however, could not be developed so long as the Dorians were excluded from the rich plain of Thessaly, and were forced to eke out their scanty means by hunting and piracy. How different was the rough and perilous life of the ancient sea-kings of the Normans from the proud and secure existence of the barons in Normandy! Yet the eye of the observant historian can trace a unity of national character even in the most different circumstances. By a similar analogy, this remarkable expedition of Doric adventurers from Hestiæotis to Crete will explain the zeal of the Cretans for the worship of Apollo, the ancient connexion of Crete and Delphi, and the early existence in Crete of notions respecting a strict regulation of public life (κόσμος).