that was the main idea. “Your life’s too sweet.”
Treasuring peaceful pleasures, we retreat
from justice. Now’s the time to make our reign
worth future scribes’ esteem. Instead of grain
our ships will carry troops, who’ll liberate
your homeland. Minos piles his people’s hate,
but without our help they’ll never act on it.
I gather that his gaudy throne could fit
the two of us, Asterion, comfortably,
but we must separate for victory.
You’ll stay to govern Egypt. I will lead
our army. Knossos has no walls to impede
a land invasion, but the Cretan fleet
would probably bestow a sound defeat
on our untried ships. We’ll shun the Kairatos
and anchor at the Geropotomos,
which we’ll follow to its mountain source,
and then descend on Knossos: that will force
Minos to fight or flee: he’ll choose the latter,
but since his litter’s slow, his fleet will scatter
before he reaches it, and he will fall
with a spear or arrow in his back and crawl
toward the sea whose god won’t save him. All
her words came true, and Cretan culture merged
with Berenib’s. These circumstances urged
Asterion to keep on governing.
He never ended up developing
his inborn love of numbers. Mathematics
remained a means of guiding plumbs and mattocks
and never became self-critical enough
to help Daedalian devices snuff
out most of life. The “West” was never born,
yet neither Crete nor Egypt looked forlorn.
And Cretan murals showed things differently
from what you’ve read: his head upon the sea,
Poseidon watches the orange ingrate run
from an Egyptian queen; Asterion
never eats men in undulating aisles;
and dolphins frolick with the crocodiles.