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48 ANCIENT GRBECE. [CHAP. in.although that oracle owes its establishment to another cause,the Phoenician slave-trade, by weans of which two consecrated women were carried, the one to Ammonium in Libya, the other to Dodomu if we knew more certainly whothe Selii were, who are thought to have been a branch ofthe Pelasgi, and are said by Homer l to have been theservants of the god, and in possessionof the oracle, weshould probably be able to say more than we now can respecting its history.That it was of Egyptian origin,knowledged not only by the nacred traditions of Dodoua,but also by those of Egypt. It was impossible for these settlements to assume in Greoee the aspect winch they took inAfrica, The character of the country and the spirit of thepeople were alike opposed to it for ; though the popular religion iu Greece was not wholly unconnected with politics,the state had never, as in Egypt, been founded entirely upon religion.But those Battlements became the central pointof societies of nations j they subsisted as oracles of;whichthe Greek stood in need both in public and privatelife.is acSimilar sacred institutions arose very early on severalof the islands round Greece, and were transplanted fromthem to the continent. Those of Crete and Samothracewere the most important. The first of these islands occupies,in manyof points view, a very important place in the mostancient history of Grecian culture ;but the culture, whichsprung up in Crete, seems rather to have produced earlyblossoms than later fruits. All that we know of the gloryof Crete, belongs to the age of Homer ami the precedingtimes. 5 The period in which they cleared the sea of robbers exercised ; supremacy over the islands, and a part ofthe country on the shore, even of Attica ;and received theirlaws from Minos, the familiar friend of Jove, belongs to soremote an age,that it affords less room for certainty than forconjecture. But Crete still appears in Homer so flourishing,that hardly a country on the continent could he comparedwith it. 3The situation of this largeisland can alone serveto explain how it came to precedeHellas in culture, It1n. xvi. 234.aSee the rich compilation of Meimmis j Crete, Cyprus, Khodcfi, U>75.3Crete awes the circling waves, a fruitful soil,And ninety cities crown the sea-born ink.0(1 six. l?si, etc. in jPope, 1915, etc;.