Taken grammatically, I presume the last verse may mean, (1) The daughter of the distinguished Phœnix: or (2) The daughter of a distinguished Phœnician: or (3) A distinguished Phœnician damsel.
a. Against the first it may be urged, that we have no other account from Homer, or from any early tradition, of this Phœnix, here described as famous.
b. Against the second and third, that Homer nowhere directly declares the foreign origin of any great Greek personage.
c. Also, that in each of the previous cases, Homer has used the proper name of a person nearly connected in order to indicate and identity the woman, whom therefore it is not likely that he would in this single case denote only by her nation, or the nation of her father.
d. Against the third, that, in the only other passage where he has to speak of a Phœnician woman, he uses a feminine form, Φοίνισσα: ἔσκε δὲ πατρὸς ἐμοῖο γυνὴ Φοίνισσ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ (Od. xv. 417). But Φοίνιξ is grammatically capable of the feminine, as is shown by Herod. i. 193[658].
e. Also that Homer, in the few instances where he uses the word τηλεκλειτὸς, confines it to men. He, however, gives the epithet ἐρικυδὴς to Latona.
The arguments from the structure of the passage, and from the uniform reticence of Homer respecting the foreign origin of Greek personages, convince me that it is not on the whole warrantable to interpret Φοίνιξ in this place in any other manner, than as the name of the father of Minos.
The name Φοίνιξ, however, taken in connection with the period to which it applies—nearly three generations before the Troica—still continues to supply of itself no trifling presumption of the Phœnician origin of Minos.
It cannot, I suppose, be doubted that the original meaning of Φοίνιξ, when first used as a proper name in Greece, probably was ‘of Phœnician birth, or origin.’ But, if we are to judge by the testimony of Homer, the time, when Minos lived, was but very shortly after the first Phœnician arrivals in Greece; and his grandfather Phœnix, living four and a half generations before the Troica, was in all likelihood contemporary with, or anterior to, Cadmus. At a period when the intercourse of the two countries was in its infancy, we may, I think, with some degree of confidence construe this proper name as indicating the country of origin.
Collateral evidence.