4. That the Homeric traditions as to Minos are so remarkably supported from without.
Minos is mentioned, and somewhat largely, in no less than six different passages of the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer has given us a much fuller idea of him, than of the more popular hero Hercules, although he is not named in nearly so many passages; and it is singular, that the more ancient of the two personages is also by much the more historical. Again, the poet has told us more about Minos, although he is of foreign extraction, than he has said about all the rest of the older Greek heroes put together. Of Theseus, Pirithous, Castor, Pollux, Meleager, Perseus, Jason, and the rest, his notices are very few and meagre. In dealing with Homer, I should quote even this fact of the greater amount of his references, which in the case of most other poets would be immaterial, as a strong presumption of the superior historical importance of the person concerned.
Minos, according to Homer, had Jupiter for his father, a Phœnician damsel for his mother, and Rhadamanthus for his younger brother. The name[276] of his mother is not recorded, but Jupiter calls her far-famed. This fame, if due to her beauty, would probably have kept her name alive; but as it has not been preserved, it is more probably a reflection from the subsequent greatness of her son.
The story thus far appears probably to indicate that Minos was a Phœnician by birth, but without a known ancestry, and raised into celebrity by his own energies and achievements.
The mode, by which he rose to fame, was by the government of men and the foundation of civil institutions. At nine years old he received, such is the legend, revelations from Jupiter,[277] and reigned, in the great or mighty city (μεγάλη πόλις) of Cnossus, over Crete: such was the form, copied by the politic legislator of Rome, in which a title to veneration was secured for his laws. No other city, besides this capital, is described in Homer by the epithet μεγάλη, or by any equivalent word.
A further vivid mark of his political greatness is afforded us by that passage in the Odyssey, which exhibits him not simply as exercising in the world beneath[278] the mere office of a judge, but rather as discharging there a judicial function in virtue of his sovereignty. Such is the force of the word θεμιστεύειν,[279] which signifies rather to give law than to administer it: or, at least, to exercise the function of a king rather than of a judge[280] (ἵστωρ). He is described as still the illustrious son of Jupiter, Διὸς ἀγλαὸς υἱός. Even there he appears not as one of the suffering or bewildered inhabitants of that lower world, but in the exercise of power as an actual ruler among the spirits of the departed;
οἱ δέ μιν ἀμφὶ δίκας εἴροντο ἄνακτα.
He only is invested with any character of this kind. Every other apparition below is either in actual suffering, or gloomy and depressed.
The epithet ὀλοόφρων, applied to Minos in an earlier passage of the Νεκυία, might perhaps convey the same idea as Virgil has rendered by his durissima regna,[281] in the description of Rhadamanthus: and we may also compare the address of Menelaus in the Third Iliad to Jupiter,
Ζεῦ πάτερ οὔτις σεῖο θεῶν ὀλοώτερος ἄλλος.[282]