are the subject of so many of
the heroic stories of Israel's Iron Age, was the last survival of
the great race of Minos. Samson made sport for his Cretan captors
in a Minoan Theatral Area by the portico of some degenerate House
of Minos, half palace, half shrine, with Cretan ladies in their
strangely modern garb of frills and flounces looking down from
the balconies to see his feats of strength, as their ancestresses
had looked down at Knossos on the boxing and bull-grappling of the
palmy days when Knossos ruled the AEgean. The great champion whom
David met and slew in the vale of Elah was a Cretan, a Pelasgian,
one of the Greeks before the Greeks, wearing the bronze panoply with
the feather-crested helmet which his people had adopted in their
later days in place of the old leathern cap and huge figure-eight
shield. Ittai of Gath, David's faithful captain of the bodyguard,
and David's body-guards themselves, the Cherethites and Pelethites
(Cretans and Philistines), were all of the same race.

Though these last supporters of the great Minoan tradition had
fallen upon evil times, it is evident that they were not altogether
degenerate. The references to their cities in Scripture show that
they still retained the national taste for splendid buildings;
and no doubt their culture, though belonging to the last and most
debased period of Minoan art, was far in advance of that of the
rude Hebrew tribes. The golden mice and tumours which they sent to
the Hebrews along with the ark of Jehovah recall on the one hand
the skill of the Minoan goldsmiths, and on the other the votive
images of animals and diseased human organs placed in the old shrine
at Petsofa. The respect which was excited by their warlike prowess
can easily be read between the lines of the Hebrew story. A race
that to its opponents appears to breed giants is a race that has
proved itself thoroughly respectable on the field of war; and the
fact that a small league of five towns maintained itself so long as
it did, and was able to make itself so dreaded, points to bravery
and skill in arms altogether out of proportion to its actual strength
in mere numbers. Evidently the last Minoans succeeded in creating
an atmosphere for themselves in Palestine, and in impressing the
surrounding peoples with a wholesome terror of them. We may imagine
the men from Crete, lithe and agile, as we see them on the Boxer
Vase of Hagia Triada, swaggering in their bronze armour among the
w