EPIMENIDES  , poet and

prophet of Crete, lived in the 6th century B.C . Many fabulous stories are told of him, and even his existence is doubted . While tending his father's sheep, he is said to have fallen into a deep sleep in the Dictaean cave near Cnossus where he lived, from which he did not awake for fifty-seven years (Diogenes Laertius i . 109-115) . When the Athenians were visited by a pestilence in consequence of the murder of Cylon, he was invited by Solon (596) to purify the city . The only reward he would accept was a branch of the sacred olive, and a promise of perpetual friendship between Athens and Cnossus (Plutarch, Solon, 12; Aristotle, Ath . Pol . 1) . He died in Crete at an advanced age; according to his country-men, who afterwards honoured him as a god, he lived nearly three hundred years . According to another story, he was taken prisoner in a war between the Spartans and Cnossians, and put to death by his captors, because he refused to prophesy favourably for them . A collection of oracles, a theogony, an epic poem on the Argonautic expedition, prose works on purifications and sacrifices, and a cosmogony, were attributed to him . Epimenides must be reckoned with Melampus and Onomacritus as one of the founders of Orphism .

He is supposed to be the Cretan prophet alluded to in the

epistle to Titus (i . 12) . See C . Schultess, De Epimenide Cretensi (1877); O . Kern, De Orphei, Epimenidis . . . Theogoniis (1888) ; G . Barone di Vincenzo, E. di Creta e le Credenze religiose de'suoi Tempi (188o) ; H . Demoulin, Epimenide de Crete . (19o1); H . Diets, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903); O . Kern in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopddie .