DICTE AND LEUKE 25

mass of votive offerings, knives and brooches and vases,
and the double axes that loom so large in the cult of
Minoan times.1 It was this grotto, without doubt, that
early Greek tradition, in the centuries that followed the
sack of Knossos, fabled as the birth cave of Zeus, the
holy ground that dimly symbolised the passing away of
the old faith before the new. It was here that Mother
Rhea fled to bear the King of Heaven that was to be, God
made in the image of man ; while Father Kronos and
the world he ruled, confident that the new anthropo-
morphism was destroyed, clung to the stone child, the
aniconic pillar worship that expressed itself in the Bethels
of the Semites and the Pillar Rooms at Knossos.8 It
was here that Zeus, come to man's estate and the
throne of Heaven, loved the daughter of man, Europa ; 1
and here that their son Minos went up into the mountain,
while his people waited below, and, like Moses, communed
with God. Like Moses, too, he came down with the Com-
mandments/ the Imperial Law that governed the /Egean,
and followed men, so the legend ran, even to Hades
below, where Minos judged among the dead.5

At Leuke, a little island off the south-east coast, we
pass from the religion of the Minoan world to its commerce.
The bank of crushed murex shell that Professor Bosanquet
found here, and again at Palaikastro, in company with a
whole mass of Kamares pottery/ shows that the men of
Sidon and Tyre were not the first to practise the dyeing
of purple. ^Eschylus was more of an antiquarian than
he knew when he made Clytemnestra play upon the

1 M.R. Jan. 1901, pp. 49-62, with ten (unnumbered) Plates ;
B.S.A. vi. pp. 94-116, Plates Vill.—XL figs. 27-50. See below,
chap. viii.

3 Hesiod, Theog. 459-91 ; Evans in J.H.S. xxi. pp. 99-204,
figs. 1-70 and Plate V. See below, chaps, viii., ix.
;l Lucian, Dial. Mar. xv. 326-7.

* Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. ii. 61 ; Strabo, 476.
0 Od. xi. 568-71.

• B.S.A. ix. pp. 276-7 ; J.H.S. xxiv. p. 321.