EXCURSUS A. ON CRETE.

×It has been thought convenient to treat in a separate excursus the testimonies which relate to the island of Crete, not because they belong to any other thesis than those which have already been enumerated, but because they bear upon more than one of them at once, and could not have been distributed among the several heads to which they belong without a repetition which the reader would have had reason to regard as tedious. They relate, in the first place, to the tomb of Jupiter, which the Cretans are said to have shown; in the second place, to the Curetes and the Idaean Dactyli, by whom the infant Jupiter is said to have been nourished; and in the third place, to Minos, and to the seat of the Titans about Cnosus. Of these the first is the most considerable, and has been the most variously treated; and I shall accordingly give it the greater part of the space which the limits of an excursus permit, reserving for a second excursus the consideration of a question which, though it arises out of the same testimonies, requires an examination of a different kind.¹ NB-33-002 NB-30-013

×The tomb of Jupiter is known to us chiefly through a writer who denies that the god whose tomb it was had ever died. Callimachus, in his hymn to Jupiter, reproaches the Cretans with the saying that they are always liars, and gives as the reason of the reproach that they had built a tomb for the god: Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται: καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, σεῖο Κρῆτες ἐτεκτήναντο: σὺ δ᾽ οὐ θάνες, ἐσσὶ γὰρ αἰεί (the Cretans are always liars; for the Cretans have built a tomb of the king to whom the hymn is addressed; but he did not die, for he is for ever).² It is to be observed, first, that the poet does not deny the existence of the tomb, but admits it, and denies only the death which it supposes; and secondly, that the first words of his reproach are cited by the Apostle, who ascribes them to one whom he calls "a prophet of their own," and who declares that "the Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies."³ I do not presume to infer from the Apostle's citation anything respecting the tomb, of which he does not speak; I observe only that the reproach was current, that it was of Cretan origin, and that the poet who employed it against the Cretans employed it in defence of a doctrine which the tradition of the island did not support. NB-33-002 NB-31-006

×To the testimony of the poet is to be added that of the theologians whom Cotta cites in the third book of Cicero's treatise on the nature of the gods, who reckon three Jupiters, of whom two are said to have been born in Arcadia, and the third is described in these words: tertium Cretensem Saturni filium; cuius in illa insula sepulcrum ostenditur (the third, the Cretan, the son of Saturn, whose tomb is shown in that island).⁴ It is not to be supposed that this testimony is independent of the poet's, in the sense that it rests upon a separate observation of the tomb; but it is independent in another and more important sense, namely, that it proceeds from writers who, so far from denying the death of the Cretan Jupiter, distinguish him from the other two precisely by his having a grave. The theologians, therefore, receive as a circumstance of the person what the poet rejects as an impiety; and between a writer who has a doctrine to defend and writers who have only a reckoning to make, it is not difficult to determine which is the less likely to have altered what he received. NB-30-013

×Mr. Bryant, who has examined the tomb at some length, has arrived at a conclusion which it is necessary to state in his own words: "If Jupiter had been buried in Crete, as these writers would persuade us, the accounts would be uniform about the place where he was deposited"; and he observes that some place the tomb in the city of Cnosus, others in a cavern upon Mount Ida, and others upon Mount Jasius; from which he concludes that the Cretans could not have been the authors of the notion.⁵ With great respect for a writer to whom every inquirer into these subjects is under obligations, I am unable to perceive that the conclusion follows from the premises. That a death is related with more than one place of burial proves a confusion respecting the place, and does not prove that there was no death to be related; and the disagreement of the accounts, so far from showing that the Cretans did not hold the tradition, rather shows that the tradition was held in more places than one, and had been localised, as such traditions commonly are, wherever it was received. The argument would be valid against a tomb which had been invented; it is of no force against a tomb which had been remembered.⁶ NB-31-006

×I conclude, upon this part of the excursus, that the tradition of the island, which the poet rejects as impious, is on that very account to be preferred to the poet, as being the less sophisticated; that what was a lie to Callimachus was the remnant of a truth, namely, that he whom the Cretans worshipped had lived and died among men; and that the person, whoever he may prove to have been, is to be referred to the deifying of the patriarchs, and not to the transfer of the divine titles to any of the heavenly bodies. Whether he is to be referred to the family of Ham, or is one of those in whom the memory of the patriarch himself was preserved, is a question which I have reserved for the second excursus.⁷ NB-33-002 NB-31-006 NB-30-013

×The testimonies which relate to the Curetes and to the Idaean Dactyli are preserved chiefly by Diodorus, who reports, upon the authority of the writers whom he follows, that the Dactyli of Crete discovered the use of fire and the nature and working of copper and of iron, and that, being regarded as the authors of great benefits to the race of men, they received immortal honours; that after them there were nine Curetes, whom some made to be born of the earth and others to be descended from the Dactyli; that these dwelt in mountainous places, wooded and broken, for want of houses, which had not yet been invented; that they were the first to gather sheep into flocks and to tame the other animals, and to discover the making of honey; that they invented swords and helmets and the war-dance; and that they received the infant Jupiter from his mother, unknown to his father Saturn, and brought him up.⁸ It will be perceived that nothing which is here related of the Curetes is related of a god: they dwell, they invent, they are honoured; and the honour, in the case of the Dactyli expressly, follows upon the benefit, and not the benefit upon the honour. I do not know a testimony in which the deifying of men for their inventions is more plainly described by a heathen writer, or in which the order of the two is more distinctly preserved. NB-31-016 NB-32-012

×In the same place Diodorus records an instance of another kind, which it is the more necessary to notice as it shows that the ancients themselves were aware of the confusion of persons by the sameness of names, which it has been the error of some among the moderns to make the instrument of identification. One of the Dactyli, he says, was named Heracles, and, excelling in fame, established the Olympic games; and the men of a later age, because the name was the same, supposed that it was the son of Alcmena who had instituted them.⁹ Here the confusion is confessed by a heathen writer to have been a confusion, and is ascribed to its cause; and the instance may serve as a caution to those who, finding the same name in two places, suppose that they have found the same person, without inquiring whether the name was not rather the occasion of the supposition than its proof. NB-32-012

×It remains to notice the testimonies which relate to Minos and to the Titans. Strabo, following Ephorus, relates that Minos was the imitator of an earlier Rhadamanthys, a man most just, who first civilised the island by laws, and who professed to have received his decrees from Jupiter; and that Minos, in imitation of him, went up every ninth year to the cave of Jupiter, and returned with ordinances in writing, which he declared to be those of the god; and he adds that it was for this reason that the poet speaks of Minos as holding converse with Jupiter every ninth year.¹⁰ Here are two readings of one thing: the first has a man, a cave, a term of years, and a writing brought down; the second has the same term and the same cave, and the writing has become a converse with the god. The former I take to be the relation, and the latter the poet's making of it; and I do not adopt the inference of Ephorus, that the lawgiver pretended, which is his judgment upon the matter, and not a part of the relation. To the same class belongs the account which the Cretans gave, as Diodorus reports it, that the Titans dwelt in the country about Cnosus while the Curetes were still young, and that the foundations of a house of Rhea, and a cypress grove consecrated to her from ancient times, were still pointed out in his day.¹¹ A dwelling which is pointed out is a dwelling which was remembered; and the persons who are said to have inhabited it are set in the same age as the Curetes, whose character, as has been shown, is that of men. NB-33-012 NB-34-011

×The result of the excursus may be stated in a few words. The tradition of Crete, wherever it can be distinguished from the reading which the poets and the philosophers have imposed upon it, preserves the memory of men: of a person who died and was buried, of benefactors who were honoured for their inventions, of a lawgiver who went up to a cave and came down with a writing, and of a dwelling which was still shown. It is therefore a principal witness to the eighth thesis, and it is a witness the more valuable because it has been preserved, for the most part, by writers who did not understand it, and who reported it either to refute it or to explain it away. The question by which of the families of the Dispersion the island was first peopled, which Bochart has determined in a manner that would bring the Cretans into connexion with the Philistines, belongs rather to the first Book than to the present excursus, and I do not enter upon it here.¹² NB-34-011 NB-33-012 NB-31-016