Rhadamanthus

Rhadamanthus, also spelled Rhadamanthys, was a son of Zeus and Europa and a brother of Minos and Sarpedon. He was said to have made laws for the islands, and after his death he became a judge of the dead. In Homer and Pindar he lives in the Elysian plain, the Isles of the Blessed, where the just are sent.

Family

Zeus took the form of a bull and carried Europa to Crete, where she bore him Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus (Apollodorus, Library 3.1.1; Diodorus 4.60.2). Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women already told the story and named the three sons, “Minos the ruler, and just Rhadamanthys and noble Sarpedon” (fr. 19 and the Europa fragment). Homer knows the same mother but does not name her: in the Iliad (14.321–322) Zeus himself recalls “the daughter of far-famed Phoenix, who bore me Minos and godlike Rhadamanthys.” Homer gives Sarpedon a different mother, Laodamia the daughter of Bellerophon (Iliad 6.198–199), as Apollodorus notes. Diodorus adds that Asterius, king of Crete, married Europa and, being childless, adopted the three boys as his heirs (4.60.3). Pausanias records a quite different genealogy from the poet Cinaethon, who made Rhadamanthus a son of Hephaestus, son of Talos, son of Cres (8.53.5).

Consort and children

Apollodorus gives him one wife, Alcmene, the mother of Heracles, whom he married in Boeotia after the death of her husband Amphitryon (Library 2.4.11, 3.1.2). Pherecydes told it differently: when Alcmene died at Thebes, Zeus sent Hermes to steal her body from the bier, leaving a stone in its place, and to carry her to the Isles of the Blest as Rhadamanthus’ wife; the Thebans found the stone and set it up in a grove where Alcmene had a shrine (Pherecydes fr. 39, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis 33). The sons named for him are founders and rulers of islands and cities: Gortys, whom the Cretans called a son of Rhadamanthus and the man after whom Gortyn was named (Pausanias 8.53.4); Erythrus, who led Cretan settlers to Erythrae on the coast of Asia Minor (Pausanias 7.3.7; Diodorus 5.84.3); and Alcaeus, to whom he gave the island of Paros (Diodorus 5.79.2).

Lawgiver and Exile

Apollodorus says that Rhadamanthus “legislated for the islanders,” but later fled to Boeotia, where he married Alcmene (Library 3.1.2); elsewhere he adds that the couple lived as exiles at Ocaleae in Boeotia (Library 2.4.11). Apollodorus gives no reason for the flight. Diodorus does: Minos, who kept his brother beside him as an adviser, grew jealous of the admiration his justice earned and sent him away to the farthest parts of his realm, the islands facing Ionia and Caria, where Rhadamanthus settled his followers (5.84.2–3). Diodorus also says that he gave the justest judgments of any man, punished robbers and the impious without mercy, and gave an island or a city to each of his captains – Lemnos to Thoas, Peparethos to Staphylus, Delos to Anion, Andros to Andreus and others (5.79.1–2).

His laws were proverbial. A verse ascribed to Hesiod was known as the saying of Rhadamanthus: if a man suffers what he has done, that is straight justice (Hesiod fr. 1 of the Great Works, quoted by Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.8). Plato has a Cretan speaker say that Rhadamanthus “was exceedingly just” and earned the name by his administration of justice (Laws 624b–625a), and in the dialogue Minos the laws of Crete, the oldest in Greece, are called the laws of Minos and Rhadamanthus (318d–320c). In the Laws Plato also admires his method of deciding lawsuits by an oath, which worked because the men of his time firmly believed in the gods (948b–c). Apollodorus tells how the young Heracles, tried for killing his music teacher Linus, quoted a law of Rhadamanthus that whoever defends himself against a wrongful aggressor shall go free, and was acquitted (Library 2.4.9).

Judge of the Dead

After his death, Apollodorus says, he sits as judge in Hades along with Minos (Library 3.1.2). Plato gives the fullest account. In the Gorgias (523e–524a), Zeus appoints three of his sons to judge the souls of the dead, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus and Minos. Rhadamanthus judges those who come from Asia, Aeacus those from Europe, and Minos has the final decision when the other two cannot decide. In the Apology (41a) Socrates hopes to meet Rhadamanthus among the other just demigods who became judges in the underworld.

Virgil also places Rhadamanthus in the underworld: in Aeneid 6.566–569 he holds a “most severe” rule in Tartarus, hearing the crimes of the wicked and forcing them to confess. Ovid, by contrast, pictures him still alive and ageing: Jupiter laments that he cannot keep his sons Aeacus, Rhadamanthus and Minos young (Metamorphoses 9.435–440).

In the Elysian Plain

An older picture appears in Homer. In the Odyssey (4.561–569), the sea god Proteus tells Menelaus that he will not die in Argos but will be sent by the gods to the Elysian plain, at the edge of the earth, “where yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is.” Pindar likewise places him in the Isles of the Blessed, where the righteous live by the counsels of Rhadamanthus, whom the great father Cronus keeps beside him as his assessor (Olympian 2.68–77).

Homer mentions him once more: the Phaeacians once carried “fair-haired Rhadamanthus” in their ships to Euboea to visit Tityus, the son of Earth, and came home the same day (Odyssey 7.321–326). In these passages Rhadamanthus is a ruler of the place of the blessed rather than a judge in the underworld, and nothing is said of his death.

Two Pictures of One Figure

The sources do not describe him in a single way. In Homer and Pindar he belongs to the realm of the blessed and is its ruler. In Plato, Apollodorus and Virgil he is one of the judges of the dead. Plato adds a moral setting: the judges examine each soul, and those found just are sent to the Isles of the Blessed, while the unjust go to Tartarus.

Homer places Rhadamanthus in that distant plain but says nothing of his life on earth; Apollodorus and Diodorus supply that, with the laws for the islanders, the quarrel with Minos and the flight to Boeotia. Minos, his brother, is the other Cretan who became a judge of the dead and has his own page.

See Also: Minos, Zeus, Europa, Aeacus, Alcmene, Heracles, Elysium, Hades