Epimenides

The long sleep

Epimenides is a figure from Crete, remembered as a seer, someone who could foresee events, and as a purifier, someone who performed rites to cleanse a place of guilt. Diogenes Laertius, an ancient writer of the lives of philosophers, says he came from Knossos.

His story opens with a lost sheep. At noon, while searching for it, Epimenides goes into a cave and falls asleep. He wakes, carries on searching and thinks only a short time has passed. But the farm now has a new owner. In the town, strangers question him in his own house. At last he finds his younger brother, now an old man, and learns that he has slept for 57 years.

The sleep is more than a gap in time. It turns an unknown Cretan into a man people believe the gods especially favour. That reputation is what later brings a ship from Athens to fetch him.

The cave without a name

In this account the cave has no name and no mountain.

Another passage in Diogenes sends the philosopher Pythagoras into the Idaean Cave, on Mount Ida in Crete, together with Epimenides. But it does not say that this was the cave of the long sleep. Both episodes belong to the same legendary life, yet together they still do not point to one cave that a visitor could find.

The story of the sleep also fits a wider pattern in his life. Diogenes reports several ages at which Epimenides died, and they cannot all be true. They include 157 and 299 years. He also tells of predictions made long before they were supposed to come true. The long sleep is one part of an ancient effort to place Epimenides beyond the reach of an ordinary lifetime.

The sheep released from the Areopagus

Diogenes tells the story of the visit to Athens. A plague, a deadly sickness, strikes the city. The Pythian priestess, who gives the answers of the god Apollo, orders that Athens be purified. The Athenians send a man named Nicias to Crete to fetch Epimenides.

Epimenides takes black and white sheep to the Areopagus, a hill in Athens. He lets them go and tells helpers to watch where each animal lies down. At each of those spots, a sacrifice is made to the local god.

Diogenes says the plague then ended, and that altars with no name across Attica, the land around Athens, still marked the rites. He also records another reason for the trouble. In this version the city was stained by an earlier crime: the failed attempt by Cylon to seize power, and the killing of people who had asked the gods for protection. Diogenes gives both explanations and does not choose between them.

Plutarch’s different visit

The writer Plutarch tells the visit differently. His Epimenides comes from Phaestus, not Knossos, and he works beside the Athenian Solon.

In Plutarch, rites of purification and new holy places make the city pay more attention to justice. Changes to funeral customs put an end to harsh ways of mourning.

The two accounts agree on the main point. A Cretan expert in ritual is called to Athens. But they disagree about where he came from and about what his visit mainly achieved. In Diogenes, the result is the end of a plague. In Plutarch, it is a change in how the city behaves.

A date that moves by a century

The date of the visit is no firmer than his birthplace. Diogenes places the purification in the 46th Olympiad, the four-year period between Olympic Games, near the start of the sixth century BC.

The philosopher Plato tells it another way. In his work the Laws, a speaker from Crete says Epimenides came to Athens ten years before the Persian Wars. He says Epimenides predicted that the invasion would be delayed and would fail in the end. That puts the visit about a century later.

Neither date can correct the other without throwing out one of the ancient accounts. The disagreement shows what Epimenides had become. His was a respected name, attached to the cleansing of cities, to inspired warnings and to the religious knowledge of Crete, across stories that do not fit into one workable lifetime.

The reward and the treaty with Knossos

After the purification, the Athenians vote Epimenides a reward of money and give him a ship to sail home. Diogenes says he refuses the money. Instead, he makes a treaty of friendship and alliance between Knossos and Athens.

That links his public work back to the city named as his home. He goes home having turned a personal honour into a bond between two cities.

Writings that went under his name carried the same authority onto the page. Diogenes lists poems on the Curetes and the Corybantes, a theogony, a poem on the birth of the gods, and an account of the ship Argo. He also lists prose works on sacrifices, on the laws of Crete, and on Minos and Rhadamanthus, early rulers of Crete. The list cannot show whether one man wrote all of them. It shows what later readers expected Epimenides to know: the gods, ritual, and the laws and earliest rulers of Crete.

The firmest ground in his life story is not the cave of his sleep, which has no location. It is Knossos, named at its beginning and again when he leaves Athens.