world is reflected in his story: Minos was not only reckoned brother to Rhadamanthus, but he became himself a judge of the dead, an office in which he enjoyed a reputation for the most complete impartiality, whereas he was regarded during his life in this world as the cruel tyrant who exacted from Athens a tribute of boys and girls to be devoured underground by the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bovine head. With this Cretan Fomor compare the horse-headed Morc, or March, and his Fomorian fleets, with their head-quarters on Tory Island, exacting from the men of Erinn a tribute consisting, besides other grievous exactions, of two-thirds of their children every year as the Winter Calends came round (p. 584). The story of Cúchulainn slaying the three Fomori who came on November-eve to carry away the King of the Isles' daughter (p. 464), reduces the tribute to a single person, and forms a connecting link between the Celtic idea of Fomorian demons and the dragon of the stories of our childhood.
Let us now take the words Manu-s and Μίνω-ς as our clue and see if we can identify any others here in point. First may be mentioned Manes or Manis, said to have been the name of an ancestral king of the Phrygians;[1] but the connection remains doubtful, and one is safer under the guidance of Tacitus in the Germania, where he mentions Mannus as the ancestor of the ancient Germans, and as the son of Teuto or Tuisco. We are not told whether he was reckoned a giant or a god; but the position given him in the pedigree hardly suggests that he was regarded as a mere man; while he who
- ↑ Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, xxiv.; Fick3, i. 166.
