Epimenides the Cretan: A History of Athens (6th-5th c. BC)

The story of the Cretan seer and poet Epimenides, supposed to have lived for more than 150 years between the seventh and sixth centuries, is full of fancy tales that are hard to make profit from a historical perspective. Instead of exploring the subject from a Cretan perspective of the archaic period, however, these tales can be investigated from a late archaic and Classical Athenian perspective, within a tradition of semiotic analysis, through a study of the use of historical characters that has led to the invention of traditions such as that of the Seven Sages. Epimenides appears in several key Athenian episodes of the sixth and fifth centuries, the Cylonian affair and the Great Plague, and in Peloponnesian politics. In the popular traditions and historiography of the Classical period, the intervention of the Cretan seer was used to transmit propaganda, to mediate diplomatic alliance or to frame religious rituals. A study on Epimenides illustrates how mythography was used as a means to mediate social action and to record history in Classical Greece. The involvement of a seer in Greek politics of the sixth and fifth centuries also questions the popular notion that rational thinking had then overcome superstition and magical mediation in the rule of the Classical city.