when features now laboriously uncovered by the spade were still
perceptible amid the mass of ruins. The name [Labyrinth] was still
preserved, though the exact meaning, as supplied by the native
Cretan dialect, had been probably lost. Hard by the western gate,
in her royal robes, to-day but partially visible, stood Queen Ariadne
herself--and might not the comely youth in front of her be the
hero Theseus, about to receive the coil of thread for his errand
of liberation down the mazy galleries beyond? Within, fresh and
beautiful on the walls of the inmost chambers, were the captive
boys and maidens locked up here by the tyrant of old. At more than
one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according
to the favourite Mycenaean motive, grappled with by a half-naked
man. The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting
on the soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found
on this site represents a monster with the lower body of a man
and the forepart of a bull.

'One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations
on the rude Greek settler of those days was not less than that of
the disinterred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything
around--the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an
older world, would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural.
It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. The
later stories of the grisly King and his man-eating bull sprang,
as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a
superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers.
Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the
north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing."
Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time
of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a tradition
and a name.'[*]

[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]

Who, then, were the invaders who, whether they remained as a ruling
caste in the land which they had conquered, or merely destroyed
and departed, inflicted upon the Minoan civilization a blow from
which it never recovered? The Cretans of Praesos, whose story of the
Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to
Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus destitute
of inhabitants ... other men, and especially the Grecians, went, and
settled there.' As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out,