Epimenides

• 1. Introduction

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  Epimenides of Knossos, also called Epimenides of Crete, is said to have slept for fifty-seven years. The tale places him in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus. He had gone there while tending his father's sheep, and he reportedly woke with the gift of prophecy. Scholars describe him as semi-mythical. He was a seer and philosopher-poet of the 7th or 6th century BC, from Knossos or Phaistos. Ancient writers disagree about what he did and how he died. Why would a city in crisis send for a Cretan shepherd? What happened to the writings credited to him? And how did one saying attributed to him become a famous puzzle about truth and lying?

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• 2. The Plague At Athens

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  When a pestilence raged in Athens, the Pythonic oracle gave the Athenians an unusual instruction. They were to bring Epimenides over from Crete and ask for his advice. Diogenes Laërtius preserves the story. On arriving, Epimenides set sheep loose on Mars Hill. Wherever the animals lay down, he had altars raised "to the suitable god". The account was offered as the explanation for Athens' anonymous altars. One of them was apparently mentioned by Saint Paul in his speech on that hill, recorded in Acts 17. A second ancient writer, Plutarch, gives Epimenides a further and more political task in the same city.

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• 3. Solon's Purifier

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  Plutarch writes that Epimenides purified Athens after the pollution brought by the Alcmeonidae. His expertise in sacrifices and his reform of funeral practices were of great help to Solon, who was reforming the Athenian state. Epimenides refused payment. The only reward he would accept was a branch of the sacred olive and a promise of perpetual friendship between Athens and Knossos. Plutarch's Life of Solon and Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia both touch on this. Athenaeus links him to another purification tale, in which the pair Aristodemus and Cratinus, described as erastes and eromenos, were believed to have given their lives to cleanse Athens. Even in antiquity, some held that story to be pure fiction. Diogenes Laërtius also preserves letters between Epimenides and Solon in his Lives of the Philosophers, and they are spurious. Epimenides was said to have prophesied at Sparta as well, on military matters.

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• 4. Skin And Legend

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  Pausanias reports a strange detail from the death of Epimenides. When he died, his skin was found to be covered with tattooed writing. This struck the Greeks as odd, because they reserved tattooing for slaves. Some modern scholars read it as a sign that he inherited the shamanic religions of Central Asia, since tattooing is often linked to shamanic initiation. The skin was kept at the courts of the ephores in Sparta, conceivably as a good-luck charm. His countrymen told a different tale of his end. They said he died in Crete at an advanced age, having lived nearly three hundred years, and they later honoured him as a god. A rival story has the Spartans and Knossians at war. Epimenides was captured and put to death because he refused to prophesy favourably for his captors. Diogenes Laërtius adds one last meeting. In Crete, Epimenides met Pythagoras, and the two went together to the Cave of Ida.

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• 5. Lost Works And Cretica

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  A theogony, an epic poem on the Argonautic expedition, and a cosmogony were all attributed to Epimenides. So were prose works on purifications and sacrifices, a collection of oracles, a work on the laws of Crete, and a treatise on Minos and Rhadymanthus. All of these are now lost. One poem, the Cretica, survives only through quotation, and a scholar named James Rendel Harris traced it through an unlikely route. Harris found a passage in a Nestorian Scriptural commentary in Syriac, quite possibly written by Theodore of Mopsuestia. It comments on Acts 17:18 and says the Cretans used to tell of Zeus as a prince ripped up by a wild boar and then buried. In the commentary, Minos, the son of Zeus, answers with a panegyric. Harris argued that this panegyric was based on the poem of Epimenides. He proposed a hypothetical Greek original and an English rendering. It begins with the Cretans fashioning a tomb for the holy and high one, then calls them "Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies." It continues with "But you are not dead: you live and abide forever."

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• 6. Echoes In Scripture

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  The final line of Harris's reconstruction reads "For in you we live and move and have our being." Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17, verse 28, quotes the fourth line and refers to one of "your own poets". The second line appears in the Epistle to Titus, chapter 1, verse 12, with a veiled attribution to "a prophet of their own". The letter uses it to warn Titus about the Cretans. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, names that prophet as Epimenides. In the same passage he notes that "some say" Epimenides should be counted among the seven wisest philosophers. The lie of the Cretans, in Harris's reading, is the claim that Zeus was mortal, while Epimenides considered Zeus immortal. Callimachus voices the same theological intent in his Hymn to Zeus. Chrysostom, in his third homily on Titus, offers an alternative fragment: "For even a tomb, King, of you / They made, who never died, but ever shall be."

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• 7. The Liar Puzzle

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  The Greek words «Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται» mean "Cretans are always liars". This is the saying now known as the Epimenides paradox. The speaker himself came from Crete, and that turns a simple insult into a statement that points back at its own author. The result is a paradox of self-reference, similar to the liar paradox. The saying has lived far beyond the lost poems and the vanished writings credited to Epimenides. It remains attached to a man whose life, from the long sleep to the tattooed skin, ancient authors could never quite separate from legend.

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