THE PALACE OF MINOS. 437 



of the ground plan itself, with its long- corridors and repeated suc- 

 cession of blind galleries, its tortuous passages and spacious under- 

 ground conduit, its bewildering system of small chambers, does in fact 

 present many of the characteristics of a maze. 



Let us place ourselves for a moment in the position of the tirst 

 Dorian colonists of Knossos after the great overthrow, when features 

 noAv laboriously uncovered by the spade were still perceptible amid 

 the mass of ruins. The name was still preserved, though the exact 

 meaning, as supplied by the native Cretan dialect, had been probabl}' 

 lost. Hard b3- the western gate in her royal robes, to-day but partially 

 visible, stood Queen Ariadne herself — and might not the comely 3'outh 

 in front of her be the hero Theseus, about to receive the coil of thread 

 for his errand of liberation down the maz}' galleries bej^ond? Within, 

 fresh and beautiful on the walls of the inmost chambers, were the cap- 

 tive boys and maidens locked up here by the tyrant of old. At more 

 than one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according 

 to the favorite M^^cena^an motive, grappled with by a half-naked man. 

 The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting on the 

 soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found on this site 

 represents a monster with the lower body of a man and the forepart of 

 a bull. 



One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations on 

 the rude Greek settler of those days w^as not less than that of the disin- 

 terred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything around — 

 the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an older world — 

 would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural. It was haunted 

 ground, and then, as now% "phantasms" were about. The later stories 

 of the grisly king and his man-eating l)ull sprang, as it were, from the 

 soil, and the whole site called forth a superstitious awe. It was left 

 severely alone by the newcomers. Another Knossos grew up on the 

 lower slopes of the hill to the north, and the old palace site )>ecamc a 

 '■'desolation and hissing." Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined 

 heaps, and by the time of the Romans the labyrinth had become noth- 

 ing more than a tradition and a name. 



