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Mitford makes the attempt of Cylon precede the legislation of Draco. A cap. The expedition against Salamis under Solon preceded the arrival of Epimenides at Athens, which was in 596. The legislation of Solon was B. C. 594 the first tyranny of Pisistratus B. C. 560: viz., thirty-four years after Solon's legislation, and at least thirty-seven years after Solon's expedition to Salamis.
He ordered several sheep, some black and some white, to be turned loose in the Areopagus, directed them to be followed, and wherever they lay down, a sacrifice was ordained in honour of some one of the gods. The order was obeyed the sacrifice performed and the phantoms were seen no more. Although an impostor, Epimenides was a man of sagacity and genius.
Success against the Megarians in the Struggle for Salamis. Cirrhaean War. Epimenides. Political State of Athens. Character of Solon. His Legislation. General View of the Athenian Constitution. Undue severity in the legislature is the ordinary proof of a general discontent: its success is rarely lasting enough to confirm a government its failure, when confessed, invariably strengthens a people.
"When I first saw the aged priest Epimenides, at Knossus in Crete, he was one hundred and fifty years old, and I remember that his age and sanctity filled me with a strange dread; but how far older, how far more sacred, is this hoary river, the ancient stream 'Aigyptos'! Who would wish to avoid the power of his spells? Now, however, I beg you to give me the history of Rhodopis."
He is said also to have studied the laws of nature under Anaximander of Miletus, to have followed the Cretan Epimenides, a famous prophet skilled also in rites of expiation, that he might learn from him and also Leodamas, the pupil of Creophylus, the reputed guest and rival of the poet Homer.
So Epimenides of Crete is said to have spent forty-five years in a cavern, and Minos descends into the sacred cave of Jupiter to receive from him the elements of law. The awe attached to woods and caverns, it may be observed, is to be found in the Northern as well as Eastern superstitions.
Aristotle made three divisions, the growing period, the stationary period, and the period of decline. Solon made ten divisions of life, and Varro made five. Ovid ingeniously compares life to the four seasons. Epimenides of Crete is said to have lived one hundred and fifty-seven years, the last fifty-seven of which he slept in a cavern at night.
But we cannot, notwithstanding, deny to pagan prophecy some share in the higher influence which inspired and moulded Hebrew prophecy. The apostle of the Gentiles took this view when he called Epimenides the Cretan a prophet. The Bible recognises the existence of true prophets outside the pale of the Jewish Church.
Yawning, he sat among 'those holy Scotists' with their wrinkled brows, staring eyes, and puzzled faces, and on his return home he writes a disrespectful fantasy to his young friend Thomas Grey, telling him how he sleeps the sleep of Epimenides with the divines of the Sorbonne. Epimenides awoke after his forty-seven years of slumber, but the majority of our present theologians will never wake up.
"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.
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