Sacred Texts: The Classics

Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: 3. Epimenides o...

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This is a scholarly fragment collection from Kathleen Freeman's 1948 reference work translating and gathering the surviving textual remnants of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers — specifically, all known fragments attributed to Epimenides of Crete, a semi-legendary figure of the late sixth to early fifth centuries B.C. Epimenides was a religious poet and prophet associated with the Orphic tradition, credited with epic cosmogonic poems and oracular pronouncements, and the text assembles quotations and paraphrases of his work preserved only secondhand in later authors like Aristotle, Plutarch, Pausanias, and even the New Testament (the famous "Cretans are always liars" paradox cited by Paul). The fragments reveal a cosmogony beginning with Air and Night producing Tartarus and eventually an Egg, alongside mythological variants that differ from the Hesiodic tradition — placing Aphrodite and the Erinyes among the children of Cronos, making the Harpies identical to the Hesperides, and offering Cretan-centered genealogies for figures like Aiêtes and Rhodes. A distinctive feature is Epimenides' focus on the deep past rather than the future, his oracles reportedly concerned with obscure historical events rather than prophecy in the conventional sense. The collection closes by flagging one fragment (#26) as a late Neo-Pythagorean forgery. This text is essential source material for anyone studying archaic Greek cosmology, Orphic religion, or the transmission of mythological variants in antiquity, but it presupposes familiarity with the broader scholarly apparatus Freeman's volume provides.

Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: 3. Epimenides o...

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