Epimenides

EPIMENIDES. - Greek poet, who lived in the 6th century B.C. According to legend, he was born at Knossos, on the island of Crete, and was then summoned to Athens by Solon to purify the city from the plague.

Historians, relying especially on Plato (Laws, I, 642), consider him a priest of Athens who lived a few decades before the Persian Wars. According to Diogenes Laertius he would have written, among other things, a Theogony connected with the legends of Hesiod and of the Orphics.

St. Paul, speaking of the Cretans, seems to quote a verse of E. in these terms: "One of them, a prophet of their own, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies" (Tit. 1:12). St. John Chrysostom declares that the verse is by E. (In Tit., 1, 12: PG 62, 575); St. Jerome adds the title of the work of E. cited: Liber oraecularum (PL 26, 571 ff.). Theodoret (PG 82, 681) instead thinks that St. Paul is quoting from Callimachus (3rd century B.C.). For he too writes: "Cretans are always liars." But Callimachus was not considered to be from Crete, but from Cyrene.
Pietro De Ambrozzi