The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 6

harbour in the bay below
broad Knossos where Minos reigned, and when the King had viewed
his captives they were cast into prison to await their dreadful doom.
But fair-haired Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, had marked Theseus as
he stood before the King, and love to him had risen up in her heart, and
pity at the thought of his fate; and so by night she came to his dungeon,
and when she could not persuade him to save himself by flight, because
that he had sworn to kill the Minotaur and save his companions, she
gave him a clue of thread by which he might be able to retrace his way
through all the dark and winding passages of the Labyrinth, and a
sword wherewith to deal with the Minotaur when he encountered him.
So Theseus was led away by the guards, and put into the Labyrinth to
meet his fate; and he went on, with the clue which he had fastened to
his arm unwinding itself as he passed through passage after passage,
until at last he met the dreadful monster; and there, in the depths of the
Labyrinth, the Minotaur, who had slain so many, was himself slain.
Then Theseus and his companions escaped, taking Ariadne with them,
and fled to their black ship, and set sail for Attica again; and landing

for awhile in the island of Naxos, Ariadne there became the hero's wife.
But she never came to Athens with Theseus, but was either deserted by
him in Naxos, or, as some say, was taken from him there by force. So,
without her, Theseus sailed again for Athens. But in their excitement at
the hope of seeing once more the home they had thought to have
looked their last upon, he and his companions forgot to hoist the white
sail; and old Ægeus, straining his eyes on Sunium day after day for the
returning ship, saw her at last come back black-winged as he had feared;
and in his grief he fell, or cast himself, into the sea, and so died, and
thus the sea is called the Ægean to this day. Another tradition, recorded
by the poet Bacchylides, tells how Theseus, at the challenge of Minos,
descended to the palace of Amphitrite below the sea, and brought back
with him the ring, 'the splendour of gold,' which the King had thrown
into the deep.
So runs the great story which links Minos and Crete with the favourite
hero of Athens. But other legends, not so famous nor so romantic, carry
on the story of the great Cretan King to a miserable close. Dædalus, his
famous artificer, was also an Athenian, and the most cunning of all men.
To him was ascribed the invention of the plumb-line and the auger, the
wedge and the level; and it was he who first set masts in ships and bent
sails upon them. But having slain, through jealousy, his nephew Perdix,
who promised to excel him in skill, he was forced to flee from Athens,
and so came to the Court of Minos. For the Cretan King he wrought
many wonderful works, rearing for him the Labyrinth, and the Choros,
or dancing-ground, which, as Homer tells us, he 'wrought in broad
Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.' But for his share in the great crime of
Pasiphae Minos hated him, and shut him up in the Labyrinth which he
himself had made. Then Dædalus made wings for himself and his son
Icarus, and fastened them with wax, and together the two flew from
their prison-house high above the pursuit of the King's warfleet. But
Icarus flew too near the sun, and the wax that fastened his wings melted,
and he fell into the sea. So Dædalus alone came safely to Sicily, and
was there hospitably received by King Kokalos of Kamikos, for whom,
as for Minos, he executed many marvellous works. Then Minos, still
thirsting for revenge, sailed with his fleet for Kamikos, to demand the
surrender of Dædalus; and Kokalos, affecting willingness to give up the

fugitive, received Minos with seeming friendship, and ordered the bath
to be prepared for his royal guest. But the three daughters of the
Sicilian King, eager to protect Dædalus, drowned the Cretan in the bath,
and so he perished miserably. And many of the men who had sailed
with him remained in Sicily, and founded there a town which they
named Minoa, in memory of their murdered King.
[Illustration II: (1) THE RAMP, TROY, SECOND CITY (p. 38)
(2) THE CIRCLE GRAVES, MYCENÆ (p. 43)]
Herodotus has preserved for us another echo of the story of Minos in
the shape of the reasons which led the Cretans to refuse aid to the rest
of the Greeks during the Persian invasion. The Delphian oracle, which