The companion of Socrates then asks how Minos got such a bad name as "an uneducated ruffian"? "Because he made war on us of Athens," answered Socrates; "and we are strong in poets, especially in that delight of the populace, tragic poetry, which is very ancient with us; and on the stage we avenged ourselves on Minos."
In truth, while Homer presented Minos as a son and pupil of Zeus, as no god himself, but a mortal man, whose sceptred spirit administered justice to the souls in Hades, it was impossible for educated Athenians not to recognise that their own wild tales (how wild few knew), were partisan fabrications.
Not only Homer, but Hesiod took the favourable view of Minos, as against the hostile Attic legends; "and these two are more worthy of belief than all the tragic poets together," says Socrates (Minos, 318 d).
The Athenians heaped not only Minos, but his wife and his brother Rhadamanthus, under a pile of ordure. Helbig, who emphatically insists on the gulf between Attic and Homeric accounts of Minos, may be consulted for the abominable anti-Minoan stories.[4]
In Homer, Cretan Idomeneus (Iliad, xiii. 450) gives his genealogy as—
Zeus
|
Minos
|
Deucalion (Not he of the Deluge)
|
Idomeneus.
In the Odyssey, xi. 321-325, Minos is named as father of Ariadne, whose tale is alluded to in a puzzling way: the other heroines of the passage are Attic, Phaedra (wife of Theseus) and Procris. In xi. 568571, Minos, "splendid son of Zeus," is seen administering justice to the dead. In a false tale of Odysseus he calls himself a Cretan of the stock of Minos. In xix. 178, Minos is father of Deucalion, and in some way is "the nine years old," or is "at periods of nine years," the companion (ὀαριστής) of Zeus. There is in Homer nothing about the Attic fables of bulls, the Minotaur, or Minoan cruelty. Homeric tradition accepts and glories in the just king Minos: Athenian tradition, in which Attica suffers grievous things at the hands of Crete, heaps hatred and contumely on him, fixing on him the world-wide Märchen of the evil being whose fair daughter befriends the adventurous hero; and adding the Märchen of the black-sailed ship which should have borne white sails of good tidings to Aegeus.
It is not merely the Attic myths of Theseus of Crete, and of the character of Minos, that differ from the Homeric. Attic legends are quite un-Homeric in character.[5] Two Attic characteristics may be noted. "The story of the sacrifice of a maiden" (or of several maidens at once) "appears and reappears in Attic tradition.... We have it in Iphigeneia...."[6] But we have it not in Homer. Again, among the royal family of Athens, in Attic tradition, it was chronic to be metamorphosed into birds. The stories were meant, originally, to account for the colours and habits of birds; such tales are numberless in the legends of Australian and other savages, who have a whole mythology of primal fowls, which is restated in the parabasis of The Birds of Aristophanes. Homer tells but one such bird myth. In Odyssey, xix. 518, Penelope speaks of the daughter of Pandareus, the brown bright nightingale, lamenting "Itylus, whom she slew with the sword unwittingly; Itylus, son of Zethus the prince." "The story has, as would be expected in a Homeric myth, nothing whatever to do with Athens."[7] The Attic story, much more horrible, is that of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus: it is as bad as Titus Andronicus. The Ionians transferred the scene to Miletus, Colophon, and Ephesus.[8] Homer wholly abstains from Attic myths, except for the mention of their heroines in a dubious passage of the eleventh book of the Odyssey.
Thus the Ionians, though they have adopted Homeric traditions, have counter-Homeric traditions, just as they have and retain the customs and rites of "the conquered race." These are demonstrable facts. On the other side, the Homeric poet ignores Ionian legends, and Ionians and Athenians have been unable to interweave Ionian tradition into the Iliad and Odyssey. There is no doubt about this matter; Homer has no Ionian, the Ionians had no Homeric traditions. This abstinence from Attic legends is not peculiar to Homer. The greatest Achaean tradition, after the Tale of Troy, was the Tale of Thebes. The Attic tragedians have so Atticised it, especially in the Oedipous Coloncus and the Suppliants of Euripides, that we think of the hapless Theban king as a patron saint of Athens; and of Theseus as his host and as the heroic friend of Thebes.