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Upon this, they sent for Epimenides the Phaestian from Crete, who is counted the seventh wise man by those that will not admit Periander into the number. He seems to have been thought a favorite of heaven, possessed of knowledge in all the supernatural and ritual parts of religion; and, therefore, the men of his age called him a new Cures, and son of a nymph named Balte.
But the belief in this miraculous sleep is traceable beyond Christian and Mohammedan legends into the Paganism of classical antiquity. Pliny, writing in the first century of our era, alludes to a story told of the Cretan poet Epimenides, who, when a boy, fell asleep in a cave, and continued in that state for fifty-seven years.
Herodotus speaks of nations where the men sleep and wake by half-years, and they who write the life of the sage Epimenides affirm that he slept seven-and-fifty years together.
“Let him who trusts in oracles trust then in this, and in the old prophecy of Epimenides that when the Persian comes it is to his hurt. But I will say with Hector of Troy, ‘One oracle is best—to fight for one’s native country.’ Others may vote as they will.
His prosperity was greater than his brain could bear, and he is drunk with it; and if he should take a nap as long as Epimenides or the Seven Sleepers he would never be sober again. He took his degree and went forth lord by mandamus, without performing exercises of merit. His honour's but an immunity from worth, and his nobility a dispensation for doing things ignoble.
Moreover, quoth Anacharsis, he affirms both plants to be great restoratives. But I would gladly hear Solon's opinion in this matter; for having sojourned long at Athens and being familiarly acquainted with Epimenides, it is more than probable he might learn of him the grounds upon which he accustomed himself to so spare a diet.
'This need not surprise us, remarked Antigonus; 'I know of a man who rose from the dead twenty days after he had been buried; I attended him both before his death and after his resurrection. 'I should have thought, said I, 'that the body must have putrefied in all that time, or if not that, that he must have collapsed for want of nourishment. Was your patient a second Epimenides?
In the "Man of Sixty Years" Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog; but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome.
It was probably this circumstance that originally brought Epimenides into repute as a prophet, and a favourite of the Gods. Epimenides appears to have been one of those persons, who make it their whole study to delude their fellow-men, and to obtain for themselves the reputation of possessing supernatural gifts.
To this purpose, Mendoca reckons up divers strange relations, as that of Epimenides, who is storied to have slept seventy-five years; and another of a rustic in Germany, who, being accidentally covered with a hay-rick, slept there for all the autumn and the winter following, without any nourishment Or, if we must needs feed upon something else, why may not smells nourish us?
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