been sent by his father to bring home some stray sheep, and
turning aside into a cave for shelter from the noontide heat, had fallen
asleep. He slept on for fifty years. Either supernatural knowledge comes
in sleep, or Epimenides invented this fable to stop all inquiries as to
where, or how, he had passed the early period of his life. He attained
the age of one hundred and fifty-four--some say three hundred years.

This remarkable person, supposed to know by what means the anger of the
gods might be propitiated, was called to Athens. What means he devised
for this purpose may easily be conjectured. After the performance of
certain religious ceremonies, the foundation of a new temple, and the
sacrifice of a human victim, the Athenians were restored to their usual
tranquillity.

"The religious mission of Epimenides to Athens," observes Mr Grote,
"and its efficacious as well as healing influence on the public
mind, deserve notice as characteristics of the age in which they
occurred. If we transport ourselves two centuries forward to the
Peloponnesian war, when rational influences and positive habits of
thought had acquired a durable hold upon the superior minds, and
when practical discussion on political and judicial matters were
familiar to every Athenian citizen, no such uncontrollable
religious misery could well have subdued the entire public; and if
it had, no living man could have drawn to himself such universal
veneration as to be capable of effecting a cure. Plato, admitting
the real healing influence of rites and ceremonies, fully believed
in Epimenides as an inspired prophet during the past, but towards
those who preferred claims to supernatural power in his own day, he
was not so easy of faith: he, as well as Euripides and
Theophrastus, treated with indifference, and even with contempt,
the Orpheotelestae of the later times, who advertised themselves as
possessing the same patent knowledge of ceremonial rites, and the
same means of guiding the will of the gods, as Epimenides had
wielded before them.... Had Epimenides himself come to Athens in
those days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative
to all public purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phye,
clothed and equipped as the goddess Athena, which had succeeded so
completely in the days of Peisistratus--a stratagem which