Epimenides

Epimenides, a half mythical poet or philosopher of ancient Greece, who was born in Crete and lived at Gnossus. He was looked on as a prophet and almost divine, and was once summoned to Athens as the fittest man to reconsecrate a temple that had been polluted. For this service he refused all reward, but begged for the friendship of Athens on behalf of Gnossus. A legend represented him as having slept in a cavern for fifty-seven years, and found all around him altered when he awoke - a legend which is familiar to most of us in its modern form of Rip Van Winkle as told by Washington Irving, and to some as the subject of Goethe's poem, The Waking of Epimenides.