In the Minos ascribed to Plato[307] we find the tradition of his direct relations with Attica, which were well known to the theatre. This supports the notice in Homer of the marriage contracted between Theseus and his daughter Ariadne.
Aristotle[308], like Thucydides, asserts the maritime power of Minos and his sovereignty over the islands, and adds, that he lost or ended his life in the course of an expedition to conquer Sicily[309].
Herodotus[310], like Thucydides, treats Minos as the first known sovereign who had been powerful by sea. He states, that Minos expelled his brother Sarpedon from Crete, and that Sarpedon with his adherents colonised Lycia, which was governed, down to the time of the historian himself, by laws partly Cretan[311]: and he also delivers the tradition that Minos was slain in an expedition against Sicily at Camicus, afterwards Agrigentum. A town bearing his name remained long after in the island.
Euripides laid the scene of his Rhadamanthus in Bœotia: and a Cretan colony is said to have established the Tilphosian temple there[312]. Höck finds traces of a marked connection between Crete and that district[313].
More important, however, than any isolated facts are the resemblances of the Lacedæmonian and Cretan politics, noticed by Aristotle[314], in combination with the admission always made by the Lacedæmonians, that their lawgiver Lycurgus initiated the Cretan institutions[315], and with the universal Greek tradition that in Crete, first of all parts of Greece, laws and a regular polity had been established by Minos. Again, in the Dialogue printed among the works of Plato, the author of it seeks to establish the fundamental idea of law: puts aside the injurious statements of the tragedians who represented Minos as a tyrant, declares his laws to have been the oldest and the best in Greece, and the models from which the prime parts of the Laconian legislation had been borrowed[316].
Among the resemblances known to us appear to be
1. The division between the military and the agricultural part of the community.
2. The περίοικοι of Crete, holding the same relation to the Cretans, as the Helots to the Spartans, and like them cultivating the land.
3. The institution of συσσίτια in both countries.