Cnosus,(2151) the Minoian Cnosus, was, even so late as the time of Plato, the first city in Crete, and the chief domicile of the Cretan laws and customs: and Plato, in his Treatise on Laws, takes a Cnosian as the representative and defender of the Cretan laws in general;(2152) although Cnosus about his time had declined from internal corruption, and the fame of having preserved the good laws of ancient Crete soon passed from her to Gortyna and Lyctus.(2153) In earlier times, however, the Cretan laws (Κρητικοὶ νόμοι), which Archilochus even mentions as being of a distinct character,(2154) were preserved in the greatest purity at Cnosus. Now when modern writers admit indeed that the Cretan laws were founded upon the customs of the Doric race, but affirm that this race did not penetrate into Crete before the expedition of the Heraclidæ, and that migrations subsequently took place from Peloponnesus; it is necessary for them first of all to show that _Cnosus_ received its Doric inhabitants from that country, that is, probably either from Argos or Sparta. But had such been the case, the memory of these migrations would assuredly never have been lost: Argos and Sparta would have been too proud to possess such a colony. Cnosus must therefore have received its Doric inhabitants at an earlier date, in the dark ages of mythology; and the subsequent colonies from Peloponnesus to Lyctus, Gortyna, and other places, helped to increase the Doric population, which in Homer’s time(2155) was confined to a _part_ of the island, over the _whole_ of Crete; as was the case in late ages. And at the time which Homer describes, not only the language, but the customs and laws were probably also different; whereas Archilochus appears to mention the Cretan laws as prevalent over the whole island. Upon the whole, the Dorians in Crete—and this is a fact of great importance—never seem to stand, with regard to the Dorians of Peloponnesus, in the relation of a colony to its mother country. In Greece, the parent state—so great was the pride of higher antiquity—never condescended to take the institutions of a colony as models for its own, as was the case with Sparta and Crete; nor did the mother country ever procure priests from its colony, as was the case when the Pythian Apollo sent Cretan priests to Sparta.(2156) In short, everything seems to prove that the Doric institutions were of great antiquity in Crete, and that the distinction which has lately been taken between the laws of Minos and the Doric institutions and customs of Crete—a distinction directly opposed to the unanimous testimony of antiquity—is false and untenable.