supremacy (Herodotus iii. 122; Thucydides i. 4). In Attic tradition and on the Athenian stage Minos is a cruel tyrant, the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed the Minotaur (q.v.). It seems possible that tribute children were actually exacted to take part in the gruesome shows of the Minoan bull-rings, of which we now have more than one illustration (see Crete: Archaeology). To reconcile the contradictory aspects of his character, two kings of the name of Minos were assumed by later poets and mythologists. Since Phoenician intercourse was in later times supposed to have played an important part in the development of Crete, Minos is sometimes called a Phoenician. There is no doubt that there is a considerable historical element in the legend; recent discoveries in Crete (q.v.) prove the existence of a civilization such as the legends imply, and render it probable that not only Athens, but Mycenae itself, was once subject to the kings of Cnossus, of whom Minos was greatest. In view of the splendour and wide influence of Minoan Crete, the age generally known as “Mycenaean” has been given the name of “Minoan” by Dr Arthur Evans as more properly descriptive (see Crete). Minos himself is said to have died at Camicus in Sicily, whither he had gone in pursuit of Daedalus, who had given Ariadne the clue by which she guided Theseus through the labyrinth. He was killed by the daughter of Cocalus, king of Agrigentum, who poured boiling water over him in the bath (Diod. Sic. iv. 79). Subsequently his remains were sent back to the Cretans, who placed them in a sarcophagus, on which was inscribed: “The tomb of Minos, the son of Zeus.” The earlier legend knows Minos as a beneficent ruler, legislator, and suppressor of piracy (Thucydides i. 4). His constitution was said to have formed the basis of that of Lycurgus (Pausanias iii. 2, 4). In accordance with this, after his death he became judge of the shades in the under-world (Odyssey, ix. 568); later he was associated with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus.
The solar explanation of Minos as the sun-god has been thrown into the background by the recent discoveries. In any case a divine origin would naturally be claimed for him as a priest-king, and a divine atmosphere hangs about him. The name of his wife, Pasiphaë (“the all-shining”), is an epithet of the moon-goddess. The name Minos seems to be philologically the equivalent of Minyas, the royal ancestor of the Minyans of Orchomenus, and his daughter Ariadne (“the exceeding holy”) is a double of the native nature-goddess. (See Crete: Archaeology.)
On Cretan coins Minos is represented as bearded, wearing a diadem, curly-haired, haughty and dignified, like the traditional portraits of his reputed father, Zeus. On painted vases and sarcophagus bas-reliefs he frequently occurs with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus as judges of the under-world and in connexion with the Minotaur and Theseus.
MINOT, LAURENCE (fl. 1333–1352), English poet, the author of eleven battle-songs, first published by Joseph Ritson in 1795 as Poems on Interesting Events in the reign of King Edward III. They had been discovered by Thomas Tyrwhitt in a MS. (Cotton Galba, E. IX., British Museum) which bore on the fly-leaf the misleading inscription: “Chaucer, Exemplar emendate scriptum.” It dates from the beginning of the 15th century. The authorship of Laurence Minot’s eleven songs is fixed by the opening of the fifth: “Minot with mowth had menid to make,” and in VII. 20, “Now Laurence Minot will begin.” The poems were evidently written contemporaneously with the events they describe. The first celebrates the English triumph at Halidon Hill (1333), and the last the capture of Guines (1352). The writer is animated by an ardent personal admiration for Edward III. and a savage joy in the triumphs of the English over their enemies. The technical difficulty of his metres and the comparatively even quality of the work led to the inference that Minot had written other songs, but none have come to light. Nothing whatever is known of his life, but the minuteness of his information suggests that he accompanied Edward on some of his campaigns. Though his name proves him to have been of Norman birth, he writes vigorous and idiomatic English of the northern dialect with some admixture of midland forms. His poems are instinct with a fierce national feeling, which has been accepted as an index of the union of interests between the Norman and English elements arising out of common dangers and common successes.
There are excellent editions of Minot's poems by Wilhelm Scholle (Quellen und Forschungen, vol. lii., Strasburg, 1884), with notes on etymology and metre, and by Mr J. Hall (Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 1897). Mr Hall is inclined to include as his work the “Hymn to Jesus Christ and the Virgin” (Religious Pieces, Early English Text Society, No. 26, p. 76), on the grounds of similarity of style and language. See also T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs (Rolls series, 1859).
MINOTAUR (Gr. Μινώταυρος, from Μίνως, and ταῦρος, bull), in Greek mythology, a fabulous Cretan monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. It was supposed to be the offspring of Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos, and a snow-white bull, sent to Minos by Poseidon for sacrifice. Minos, instead of sacrificing it, spared its life, and Poseidon, as a punishment, inspired Pasiphaë with an unnatural passion for it. The monster which was born was shut up in the Labyrinth (q.v.). Now it happened that Androgeus, son of Minos, had been killed by the Athenians, who were jealous of the victories he had won at the Panathenaic festival. To avenge the death of his son, Minos demanded that seven Athenian youths and seven maidens should be sent every ninth year to be devoured by the Minotaur. When the third sacrifice came round Theseus volunteered to go, and with the help of Ariadne (q.v.) slew the Minotaur (Plutarch, Theseus, 15–19; Diod. Sic. i. 16, iv. 61; Apollodorus iii. 1, 15). Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a Greek adaptation of the Baal-Moloch of the Phoenicians. The slaying of the Minotaur by Theseus in that case indicates the abolition of such sacrifice by the advance of Greek civilization.
According to A. B. Cook, Minos and Minotaur are only different forms of the same personage, representing the sun-god Zeus of the Cretans, who represented the sun as a bull. He and J. G. Frazer both explain Pasiphaë's monstrous union as a sacred ceremony (ἱερὸς γάμος), at which the queen of Cnossus was wedded to a bull-formed god, just as the wife of the ἄρχων βασιλεύς in Athens was wedded to Dionysus. E. Pottier, who does not dispute the historical personality of Minos, in view of the story of Phalaris (q.v.) considers it probable that in Crete (where a bull-cult may have existed by the side of that of the double axe) victims were tortured by being shut up in the belly of a red-hot brazen bull. The story of Talos, the Cretan man of brass, who heated himself red-hot and clasped strangers in his embrace as soon as they landed on the island, is probably of similar origin. The contest between Theseus and the Minotaur was frequently represented in Greek art. A Cnossian didrachm exhibits on one side the labyrinth, on the other the Minotaur surrounded by a semicircle of small balls, probably intended for stars; it is to be noted that one of the monster’s names was Asterius.
See A. Conze, Theseus und Minotauros (1878); L. Stephani, Der Kampf zwischen Theseus und Minotauros (1842), with plates and history of the legend; L. Preller, Griechische Mythologie; Helbig in Roscher’s Lexicon der Mythologie; F. Durrbach in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités; A. B. Cook in Classical Review, xvii. 410; J. G. Frazer, Early History of the Kingship (1905); E. Pottier in La Revue de Paris (Feb. 1902); the story is told in Kingsley’s Heroes.
MINSK, a government of Western Russia, bounded by the governments of Vilna, Vitebsk, Mogilev and Chernigov on the N. and E. and by Kiev, Volhynia and Grodno on the S. and W. It has an area of 35,283 sq. m. The surface is undulating and hilly in the north-west, where a narrow plateau and a range of hills (800–1000 ft.) of tertiary formation separate the basin of the Niemen, which flows into the Baltic, from that of the Dnieper, which sends its waters into the Black Sea. The remainder of the government is flat, 450 to 650 ft. above sea-level, and covered with sands and clays of the glacial and post-glacial periods. Two broad shallow depressions, drained by the Berezina and the Pripet, cross the government from north to south and from west to east; and these, as well as the triangular space between them, are occupied by immense marshes (often as much as 200 to 600 sq. m. each), ponds and small lakes, peat-bogs and moving sands, intermingled with dense forests. This country, and especially its south-western part, is usually known under the name of Polyesie (“The Woods”). Altogether, marshes and moors
