[Flourished about B.C. 596]
St. Paul in his Epistle to Titus (i. 12) is supposed to allude to
Epimenides. But little more than his name and existence are known, apart
from tradition. About B.C. 596, he was invited to Athens, in order to
stay the plague brought upon the city by an impious outrage committed by
Cylon, one of the Athenian rulers, on the altars of the Acropolis.
Succeeding in arresting the pestilence, he augmented his already great
fame--but he refused any other reward beyond the goodwill of the
Athenians in favour of the inhabitants of Gnossus, where he dwelt. He
was a native of Crete.
[From the marble in the Vatican. One of the conventional portraits of
the ancient Greek poets. The closed eyes are to represent the sleep
which tradition says he fell into for fifty-seven years.]