Epimenides

The sheep is gone and the household has changed

Epimenides enters a cave at noon while searching for a stray sheep. He wakes, resumes the search and believes that only a short time has passed. The farm now has a different owner. At 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 fifty-seven years.

Diogenes Laertius places this marvel at the opening of Epimenides’s life and calls him a native of Knossos. The sleep is not merely an interval. It turns an otherwise unknown Cretan into someone believed to enjoy unusual divine favour, and that reputation is what brings a ship from Athens.

The cave in this account has no name and no mountain. Another passage in Diogenes sends Pythagoras into the Idaean Cave with Epimenides, but it does not say that this was the cave of the fifty-seven-year sleep. The two episodes belong to the same legendary life without supplying one identifiable opening in the rock.

The sheep released from the Areopagus

When pestilence strikes Athens, Diogenes says, the Pythian priestess orders the city to be purified. The Athenians send Nicias to Crete for Epimenides. He brings black and white sheep to the Areopagus, releases them and tells attendants to watch where each animal lies down. A sacrifice is then made to the local divinity at every chosen spot.

Diogenes reports that the pestilence ended and that unnamed altars across Attica still marked the rites. He also preserves another explanation, in which the trouble came from the pollution left by Cylon’s attempted coup and the killing of suppliants. The author presents alternatives rather than a single agreed diagnosis.

Plutarch gives the visit a different emphasis. His Epimenides comes from Phaestus, not Knossos, and works beside Solon. Purifications and sacred foundations make the city more attentive to justice, while changes to funerary rites curb harsh practices of mourning. The two accounts agree on a Cretan ritual expert summoned to Athens, yet differ on his origin and on what his intervention chiefly accomplished.

A date that moves by a century

The chronology is no firmer than the birthplace. Diogenes places the purification in the forty-sixth Olympiad, near the beginning of the sixth century BC. Plato’s Laws has a Cretan speaker say that Epimenides came to Athens ten years before the Persian Wars and predicted that the invasion would be delayed and eventually fail. That places the visit about a century later.

Neither date can be used to correct the other without discarding one ancient account. The disagreement is evidence for the kind of figure Epimenides had become: a revered name attached to civic purification, inspired warning and Cretan religious knowledge across stories that did not share one workable lifetime.

Diogenes makes that elastic lifetime explicit. He reports several incompatible ages at death, including one hundred and fifty-seven and two hundred and ninety-nine years, and elsewhere adds predictions made far in advance of their supposed fulfilment. The fifty-seven-year sleep is therefore one part of a broader ancient effort to make ordinary chronology inadequate to him.

What he takes back to Knossos

After the purification, the Athenians vote Epimenides a monetary reward and provide a ship for his return. Diogenes says he refuses the money. Instead, he concludes a treaty of friendship and alliance between Knossos and Athens.

That sentence binds his public work back to the city named as his origin. It also makes the return more than a withdrawal from Athens: the seer converts personal honour into a civic relationship and goes home.

Works circulating under his name extended the same authority into writing. Diogenes lists poems on the Curetes and Corybantes, a theogony, an account of the Argo and prose works on sacrifices, the Cretan constitution, Minos and Rhadamanthus. Whether one man wrote all of them is not something the catalogue can settle. It shows what later readers expected Epimenides to know: gods, ritual, Crete’s laws and its earliest rulers.

His firmest ground in the surviving biography is consequently not the unlocated sleeping cave. It is Knossos, named at his beginning and again at his departure from Athens. Between those two notices lies the reason the city wanted him: a life in which lost time, ritual knowledge and prophecy had become inseparable.