gave the name of Jao-pater, Jupiter, to every King:  and thus both Minos and his father were Jupiters. Echemenes, an ancient author cited by Athenaeus, [163] said that Minos was that Jupiter who committed the rape upon Ganimede; though others said more truly that it was Tantalus:  Minos alone was that Jupiter who was most famous among the Greeks for Dominion and Justice, being the greatest King in all Greece in those days, and the only legislator. Plutarch [164] tells us, that the people of Naxus, contrary to what others write, pretended that there were two Minos’s, and two Ariadnes; and that the first Ariadne married Bacchus, and the last was carried away by Theseus:  but [165] Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Strabo, knew but of one Minos; and Homer describes him to be the son of Jupiter and Europa, and the brother of Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, and the father of Deucalion the Argonaut, and grandfather of Idomeneus who warred at Troy, and that he was the legislator of Hell:  Herodotus [166] makes Minos and Rhadamanthus the sons of Europa, contemporary to AEgeus:  and [167] Apollodorus and Hyginus say, that Minos, the father of Androgeus, Ariadne and Phaedra, was the son of Jupiter and Europa, and brother of Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon.

Lucian [168] lets us know that Europa the mother of Minos was worshipped by the name of Rhea, the form of a woman sitting in a chariot drawn by lions, with a drum in her hand, and a Corona turrita on her head, like Astarte and Isis; and the Cretans [169] anciently shewed the house where this Rhea lived:  and [170] Apollonius Rhodius tells us, that Saturn, while he Reigned over the Titans in Olympus, a mountain in Crete, and Jupiter was educated by the Curetes in the Cretan cave, deceived Rhea, and of Philyra begot Chiron:  and therefore the Cretan Saturn and Rhea, were but one Generation older than Chiron, and by consequence not older than Asterius and Europa, the parents of Minos; for Chiron lived ’till after the Argonautic Expedition, and had two grandsons in that Expedition, and Europa came into Crete above an hundred years before that Expedition:  Lucian [171] tells us, that the Cretans did not only relate, that Jupiter was born and buried among them, but also shewed his sepulchre:  and Porphyry [172] tells us, that Pythagoras went down into the Idaean cave, to see sepulchre:  and Cicero, [173] in numbering three Jupiters,