Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Epimenides, as Theopompus and many others say, was the son of Phaestius, though some say of Dosiadas and others of Agesarchus. He was a Cretan by birth, from Cnossus, distinguished in appearance by letting his hair grow long. Having once been sent by his father into the country after a sheep, he turned off the road at midday and fell asleep in a certain cave for fifty-seven years. Waking up after this, he began looking for the sheep, thinking he had slept only a short while. When he did not find it, he proceeded to the field, and finding everything altered and the estate in the possession of another, he returned in perplexity to the city. There, going into his own house, he encountered people asking who he was, until, finding his younger brother, who was by then already an old man, he learned from him the whole truth.

​Having become known among the Greeks, he was held to be most dear to the gods. At that time, when the Athenians too were gripped by a plague, the Pythia prophesied that they should purify the city; so they sent a ship and Nicias, the son of Niceratus, to Crete to summon Epimenides. And he, having come in the forty-sixth Olympiad, purified their city and stopped the plague in the following manner: taking black and white sheep, he led them to the Areopagus; from there he let them go wherever they wished, commanding his attendants that wherever each of them should lie down, they should sacrifice it to the fitting god; and in this way the evil ceased. Whence even now it is possible to find among the demes of the Athenians nameless altars, a memorial of the propitiation that took place at that time. But others say that he declared the cause of the plague to be the Cylonian pollution and indicated deliverance from it; and that on this account two youths, Cratinus and Ctesibius, died, and the calamity was resolved.

​The Athenians voted to give him a talent and a ship to take him back to Crete. But he did not accept the money, and instead concluded a friendship and alliance between the Cnossians and the Athenians. Having returned home, he died not long afterwards, living, as Phlegon says in his On Long-lived Persons, one hundred and fifty-seven years; or as the Cretans say, three hundred years lacking one; or as Xenophanes of Colophon says he had heard, one hundred and fifty-four years. He composed the Birth of the Curetes and Corybantes and a Theogony in five thousand verses, and the Building of the Argo and Jason’s Voyage to Colchis in six thousand five hundred verses.