Epimenides

Epimenides of Knossos was a semi-mythical Greek seer, who fell asleep for fifty-seven years in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus and awoke with the gift of prophecy.

Plutarch writes in his Life of Solon that Epimenides purified Athens after the pollution brought by the Alcmeonidae, and that the seer's expertise in sacrifices and reform of funeral practices were of great help to Solon is his reform of the Athenian state. Diogenes Laertius preserves a number of spurious letters between Epimenides and Solon in his Lives of the Philosophers. Epimenides was also said to have prophesied at Sparta on military matters.

Pausianias reports that when Epimenides died, his skin was found to be covered with tattooed writing. This was considered odd, because the Greeks reserved tatooing for slaves. Some modern scholars have seen this as evidence that Epimenides was heir to the shamanic religions of Central Asia, because tattooing is often associated with shamanic initiation. Bizarrely, the skin of Epimenides was preserved at the courts of the ephores in Sparta, conceivably as a good-luck charm.

Several prose and poetic works, now lost, were attributed to Epimenides by the Suda, including a theogony, oracles, a work on the laws of Crete, and a treatise on Minos and Rhadymanthus.

St. Paul quotes the first line of one of these poems: "Cretans, vile bellies, always liars". This gave rise to the Epimenides paradox.