of the sage the mysterious reputation of the magician. Epimenides,
numbered by some among the seven wise men, was revered throughout
Greece as one whom a heavenlier genius animated and inspired. Devoted
to poetry, this crafty impostor carried its prerogatives of fiction
into actual life; and when he declared--in one of his verses, quoted
by St. Paul in his Epistle to Titus--that "the Cretans were great
liars," we have no reason to exempt the venerable accuser from his own
unpatriotic reproach. Among the various legends which attach to his
memory is a tradition that has many a likeness both in northern and
eastern fable:--he is said to have slept forty-seven [200] years in a
cave, and on his waking from that moderate repose, to have been not
unreasonably surprised to discover the features of the country
perfectly changed. Returning to Cnossus, of which he was a citizen,
strange faces everywhere present themselves. At his father's door he
is asked his business, and at length, with considerable difficulty.
he succeeds in making himself known to his younger brother, whom he
had left a boy, and now recognised in an old decrepit man. "This
story," says a philosophical biographer, very gravely, "made a
considerable sensation"--an assertion not to be doubted; but those who
were of a more skeptical disposition, imagined that Epimenides had
spent the years of his reputed sleep in travelling over foreign
countries, and thus acquiring from men those intellectual acquisitions
which he more piously referred to the special inspiration of the gods.
Epimenides did not scruple to preserve the mysterious reputation he
obtained from this tale by fables equally audacious. He endeavoured
to persuade the people that he was Aeacus, and that he frequently
visited the earth: he was supposed to be fed by the nymphs--was never
seen to eat in public--he assumed the attributes of prophecy--and
dying in extreme old age: was honoured by the Cretans as a god.