“For Zeus at the first begat Minos to be a watcher over Crete…”
– Homer, The Iliad, 13.450
“Their judge also must be naked, dead, beholding with very soul the very soul of each immediately upon his death, bereft of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that fine array, to the end that the judgement may be just….to Minos I will give the privilege of the final decision, if the other two be in any doubt; that the judgement upon this journey of mankind may be supremely just.”
– Plato – “Plato in Twelve Volumes,” Vol. 3 , 523e – 524a
The Court of King Minos was always an interesting place, in life and death. In life, three generations before the Trojan War, he presided over the isles of Crete and others in the Aegean Sea, turning them into one of the world’s first naval powers. He received devine direction from his father Zeus which he disseminated as local laws. He drafted the Cretan Constitution. Plagued by the machinations of Daedalus, Minos imprisoned him to his own creation, the Labyrinth, which Daedalus managed to escape. Minos eventually met his end in a Roman bath searching for the inventive tinkerer.
In death, Minos served as the presiding judge over the newly deceased, deciding whether they would spend eternity in either the Isles of the Blest or Tartarus. He along with everyone he judged were naked, which Zeus believed was an improvement over the former system, tainted by the temptations of finery and adornments and character witnesses of those judged before death.