EPIMENIDES

Theologian and miracle worker in Greece of the archaic times, about whom all the information we have presents the character of legend. He was born and grew up in Phaistos, Crete, and from the events with which tradition connects him, he appears to have lived from 150 to 300 years. In Athens he was known as a friend of Solon, who not only cleansed the city of the Cylonian agos, but also prepared the people for Solon's legislative measures concerning the solemnity of worship and the refinement of mourning customs. But a second visit of his to Athens ten years before the Persian invasion was also reported. During this visit he inaugurated sacrifices indicated by Apollo and foretold the Persian attack, as well as a third invitation to him by Nicias during the Peloponnesian War, following the suggestion of Delphi. They also said that he also cleansed Delos and other cities. The Argives showed his tomb in their city, saying that his body was taken from the Lacedaemonians who killed him in a war with the Knossians, because he did not prophesized good for them, any more than the Spartans in their old ephorus.

Supernatural properties were attributed to Epimenides. Thus it was reported that he slept for 50 years in a cave, that he could abstain from all food, and that he came back to life several times, or that his soul could, when it wished, wander outside his body. He succeeded in cleansing Athens of the Cylonian Agos by leaving white and black sheep from the Areopagus (where the Eumenides lived), which the Athenians had to sacrifice to the gods where they would first settle. Written texts, a theogony and a text of oracles were also attributed to Epimenides.

All these elements place Epimenides in the religious-practical spiritual current that prevailed in the Greek cities after the height of the epic, where popular, ancestral wisdom was combined with an enthusiastic religiosity whose representatives, such as Aristeas, Avaris, Epimenides and other oracles were placed under the protection of Apollo Pythius and Patrous, the god who founded the colonies, thus their cities and genera.

This tradition, which is characteristically manifested in the opinions of the "sages" - Epimenides was considered one of the seven sages in the place of Periander - of the archaic period, was characterized as related to the shamanic religious currents and was associated with influences from the regions of the Black Sea, where Greek cities were founded during the second colonization.

But the more practical spirit that prevailed in combination with a more popular moral tradition in the expanding Greek society offers a more universal interpretation of this current, which ends with the Orphics and Pythagoras.

Tradition wanted Epimenides, the son of the nymph Valtis and the young Curitas, god-loving and wise about the divine, enthusiastic and operative wisdom (beloved of the gods and deeply knowledgeable about divine things, especially in terms of direct association with the divine and its service with ritual acts).