The other marks connected with Minos and his history give such support to this presumption as to bring the supposition up to reasonable certainty. Such are,
1. The connection with Dædalus.
2. The tradition of the nautical power of Minos.
3. The characteristic epithet ὀλοόφρων; as also its relation to the other Homeric personages with whose name it is joined.
4. The fact that Minos brought a more advanced form of laws and polity among a people of lower social organization; the proof thus given that he belonged to a superior race: the probability that, if this race had been Hellenic, Homer would have distinctly marked the connection of so distinguished a person with the Hellenic stem: and the apparent certainty that, if not Hellenic, it could only be Phœnician.
The positive Homeric grounds for believing Minos to be Phœnician are much stronger, than any that sustain the same belief in the case of Cadmus: and the negative objection, that Homer does not call him by the name of the country from which he sprang, is in fact an indication of the Poet’s uniform practice of drawing the curtain over history or legend, at the point where a longer perspective would have the effect of exhibiting any Greek hero as derived from a foreign source, and thus of confuting that claim to autochthonism which, though it is not much his way to proclaim such matters in the abstract, yet appears to have operated with Homer as a practical principle of considerable weight.
EXCURSUS II.
ON THE LINE ODYSS. V. 277.
I have the less scruple in making the verse Od. v. 277 the subject of a particular inquiry, because the chief elements of the discussion are important with reference to the laws of Homeric Greek, as well as with regard to that adjustment of the Outer Geography, which I have supported by a detailed application to every part of the narrative of the Odyssey, and which I at once admit is in irreconcilable conflict with the popular construction of the account of the voyage from Ogygia to Scheria, as far as it depends upon this particular verse.