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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 
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 ^geus, strain- 
ing 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 ^Egean to this 
day. 
the; unhappy f'ate; o^ minds 
So runs the great story which links 
Minos and Crete with the favorite 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. Daedalus, 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 ior his share in 
the great crime of Pasiphse, Minos hated 
him, and shut him up in the Labyrinth 
which he himself had made. 
Then Daedalus made wings for him- 
self 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 war-fleet. But 
Icarus flew too near the sun, and the 
wax that fastened his wings melted, and 
he fell into the sea. So Daedalus alone 
came safely to Sicily, and was there hos- 
pitably received by King Kokalos of 
Kamikos, for whom, as for Minos, he 
executed many marvelous works. Then 
Minos, still thirsting for revenge, sailed 
A gre;at jar: knossos 
with his fleet for Kamikos to demand 
the surrender of Daedalus ; and Kokalos, 
afl^ecting willingness to give up the fugi- 
tive, 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 Daedalus, 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 the mur- 
dered King. 
the; great gulp gi*' darkne;ss is 
disappe;aring 
Between the Greece of such legends 
as those which we have been considering 
and the Greece of the er^liest historic 
period there has always been a great gulf 
of darkness. On the one side a land of 
seemingly fabulous kings and heroes and 
monsters, of fabulous palaces and cities ; 
on the other side, Greece as we know it 
in the infant stages of its developrnent, 
with a totally different state of society, 
