I cannot say much that is satisfactory about Crete; in my opinion, this is another of those points in regard to which a sober inquirer must be content with very few results. I feel it my duty to caution you against all those Ogygian inquiries in ancient Greek history; they are very often no inquiries at all, but mere gossip about notions taken up at random and vaguely conceived—things which rouse the indignation of a genuine philologer. I cannot accordingly, in the case of Crete, go back to the earliest times, simply because we have no information. Cnosos and Cydon, according to some obscure account, were Argive colonies; of Lyctos it is certain that it was a Dorian colony, though neither time nor circumstances are mentioned; respecting most of the towns, no information at all has come down to us. The statement in the Odyssey,[71] where Crete is spoken of accidentally, is very singular; it does not afford us much assistance, but only leads us to the conclusion, that all the statements in the Odyssey are much more recent than those in the Iliad, and that the conclusion of the Odyssey is even of much later origin than the rest: the part I allude to must have been composed at a time which we cannot place farther back than the commencement of the Olympiads. Odysseus there says, that he comes from Crete, which was inhabited by the Dorians, Pelasgians, Cydonians, and Eteocretans. The Eteocretans are here mentioned as the most ancient inhabitants; next come the Cydonians, without any remark being made as to their nationality; the Pelasgians are otherwise not mentioned at all in those parts; and the Dorians, of course, are the later immigrants from Peloponnesus. Another and more probable statement, in Herodotus, is, that the Cretans were either Carians or Lycians, or Carians mixed with Lycians. These nations, whom we regard as barbarous, are said to have emigrated from Crete, which implies nothing beyond the fact that they belonged to the same race. The ancient inhabitants, as I have already said, afterwards appear partly in subject places, and partly as serfs in the larger towns. At no period of our history did Crete form one connected state; it consisted of a number of independent towns which, tradition says, amounted to one hundred; this is at least a proof of a very dense population. The Eteocratans, as a nation, disappear in history, without there being any definite mention of the immigration of their later rulers, and stories were invented in ancient times to account for this disappearance. According to one tradition, all the old Cretans, with the exception of two tribes, emigrated, in order to avenge the death of Minos, and all perished; while, according to another, they were all carried off by a plague, which occurred after the Trojan war. But all this is foolish.