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Updated: June 13, 2025
To the Roman general, six hundred Cretans were given by Nabis, who agreed with the praetor of the Achaeans to a cessation of arms for four months, and thus they departed from the conference. Quinctius proceeded to Corinth, advancing to the gates with the cohort of Cretans, in order that it might be evident to Philocles, the governor of the city, that the tyrant had deserted the cause of Philip.
The Cretans were a nefarious and degenerate people, with whose public and private existence piracy was as intimately associated as robbery with the commonwealth of the Aetolians; but they resembled the Aetolians in valour as in many other respects, and accordingly these two were the only Greek communities that waged a courageous and honourable struggle for independence.
They sent replies, signed by nearly forty thousand men, representing the entire Cretan population, declaring that they wanted no such arrangement. Not one of the signers approved of the idea of home rule. The Cretans are determined to be reunited to Greece, their own mother-country, and they intend to fight until they gain their point.
But, when he saw them scattered, he set out with all his cavalry, and the auxiliary Cretans, and marching with such speed that the swiftest footmen could, by running, but just keep up with the horse, he planted his standards between the camp of the Romans and their foragers.
He had, however, brought with him a large amount of treasure, and when about leaving Crete again, he was uneasy about this treasure, as he had some reason to fear that the Cretans were intending to seize it. He must contrive, then, some stratagem to enable him to get this gold away.
He landed at Canea, having lost, mostly by disease, from 20,000 to 25,000 men in a three months' campaign, and effected nothing except the destruction of six hundred villages and the murder of hundreds of Cretans.
But when the ships were ready to set sail, having with him as pilots, Daedalus himself and some Cretan exiles, as no one knew that he was coming, and the Cretans thought that it was a friendly fleet that was advancing, he seized the harbour, and marched at once to Knossus before his arrival was known. Then he fought a battle at the gates of the Labyrinth, and slew Deukalion and his body-guard.
While I commanded for more than a year a large squadron of Turkish ironclads stationed in Crete, I had many opportunities of judging as to the sentiments of the Cretans. I never saw a more orderly, well-disposed people if let alone by agitators. On my return to Constantinople the reception I received from several of the European Powers was most gratifying.
How many such as the inhabitants of Taurica along the Euxine Sea; as the King of Egypt, Busiris; as the Gauls and the Carthaginians have thought it exceedingly pious and agreeable to the Gods to sacrifice men! And, besides, the customs of life are so various that the Cretans and Ætolians regard robbery as honorable.
Be this as it will, certain it is, that, after this misadventure, the Lacedaemonians made it a rule never to carry so much as a staff into their public assemblies. But to return to their public repasts; these had several names in Greek; the Cretans called them andria, because the men only came to them.
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