The Homeric Minôs in the under-world is not a judge of the previous lives of the dead, so as to determine whether they deserve reward or punishment for their conduct on earth: such functions are not assigned to him earlier than the time of Plato. He administers justice _among_ the dead, who are conceived as a sort of society, requiring some presiding judge: θεμιστεύοντα νεκύεσσι, with regard to Minôs, is said very much like (Odyss. xi. 484) νῦν αὖτε μέγα κρατέεις νεκύεσσι with regard to Achilles. See this matter partially illustrated in Heyne’s Excursus xi. to the sixth book of the Æneid of Virgil.
According to poets later than Homer, Europê is brought over by Zeus from Phœnicia to Krête, where she bears to him three sons, Minôs, Rhadamanthus and Sarpêdôn. The latter leaves Krête and settles in Lykia, the population of which, as well as that of many other portions of Asia Minor, is connected by various mythical genealogies with Krête, though the Sarpêdôn of the Iliad has no connection with Krête, and is not the son of Europê. Sarpêdôn having become king of Lykia, was favored by his father, Zeus, with permission to live for three generations.[524] At the same time the youthful Milêtus, a favorite of Sarpêdôn, quitted Krête, and established the city which bore his name on the coast of Asia Minor. Rhadamanthus became sovereign of and lawgiver among the islands in the Ægean: he subsequently went to Bœôtia, where he married the widowed Alkmênê, mother of Hêraklês.
[524] Apollodôr. iii. 1, 2. Καὶ αὐτῷ δίδωσι Ζεὺς ἐπὶ τρεῖς γενεὰς ζῇν. This circumstance is evidently imagined by the logographers to account for the appearance of Sarpêdôn in the Trojan war, fighting against Idomeneus, the grandson of Minôs. Nisus is the eponymus of Nisæa, the port of the town of Megara: his tomb was shown at Athens (Pausan. i. 19, 5). Minôs is the eponym of the island of Minoa (opposite the port of Nisæa), where it was affirmed that the fleet of Minôs was stationed (Pausan. i. 44, 5).
Europê finds in Krête a king Astêrius, who marries her and adopts her children by Zeus: this Astêrius is the son of Krês, the eponym of the island, or (according to another genealogy by which it was attempted to be made out that Minôs was of Dôrian race) he was a son of the daughter of Krês by Tektamus, the son of Dôrus, who had migrated into the island from Greece.