The migration of the Dorians to Crete.

Cnosus, 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: 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. In earlier times, however, the Cretan laws, (Κρητιϰοί νόμοι,) which Archilochus even mentions as being of a distinct character, 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 the Peloponnese; it is necessary for them first of all to shew that Cnosus received its Doric inhabitants from that country, i. e. 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.