[658] See Jelf’s Gr. Gramm. 103. _e._ Also that Homer, in the few instances where he uses the word τηλεκλειτὸς, confines it to men. He, however, gives the epithet ἐρικυδὴς to Latona. The arguments from the structure of the passage, and from the uniform reticence of Homer respecting the foreign origin of Greek personages, convince me that it is not on the whole warrantable to interpret Φοίνιξ in this place in any other manner, than as the name of the father of Minos. The name Φοίνιξ, however, taken in connection with the period to which it applies--nearly three generations before the _Troica_--still continues to supply of itself no trifling presumption of the Phœnician origin of Minos. It cannot, I suppose, be doubted that the original meaning of Φοίνιξ, when first used as a proper name in Greece, probably was ‘of Phœnician birth, or origin.’ But, if we are to judge by the testimony of Homer, the time, when Minos lived, was but very shortly after the first Phœnician arrivals in Greece; and his grandfather Phœnix, living four and a half generations before the _Troica_, was in all likelihood contemporary with, or anterior to, Cadmus. At a period when the intercourse of the two countries was in its infancy, we may, I think, with some degree of confidence construe this proper name as indicating the country of origin. ~_Collateral evidence._~ The other marks connected with Minos and his history give such support to this presumption as to bring the supposition up to reasonable certainty. Such are, 1. The connection with Dædalus. 2. The tradition of the nautical power of Minos. 3. The characteristic epithet ὀλοόφρων; as also its relation to the other Homeric personages with whose name it is joined. 4. The fact that Minos brought a more advanced form of laws and polity among a people of lower social organization; the proof thus given that he belonged to a superior race: the probability that, if this race had been Hellenic, Homer would have distinctly marked the connection of so distinguished a person with the Hellenic stem: and the apparent certainty that, if not Hellenic, it could only be Phœnician. The positive Homeric grounds for believing Minos to be Phœnician are much stronger, than any that sustain the same belief in the case of Cadmus: and the negative objection, that Homer does not call him by the name of the country from which he sprang, is in fact an indication of the Poet’s uniform practice of drawing the curtain over history or legend, at the point where a longer perspective would have the effect of exhibiting any Greek hero as derived from a foreign source, and thus of confuting that claim to autochthonism which, though it is not much his way to proclaim such matters in the abstract, yet appears to have operated with Homer as a practical principle of considerable weight. EXCURSUS II. ON THE LINE ODYSS. V. 277.