At his father's door he is asked his business, and at length, with considerable difficulty.
he succeeds in making himself known to his younger brother, whom he had left a boy, and now recognised in an old decrepit man.

"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.
Epimenides did not scruple to preserve the mysterious reputation he obtained from this tale by fables equally audacious.

He endeavoured to persuade the people that he was Aeacus, and that he frequently visited the earth: he was supposed to be fed by the nymphs--was never seen to eat in public--he assumed the attributes of prophecy--and dying in extreme old age: was honoured by the Cretans as a god.
In addition to his other spiritual prerogatives, this reviler of "liars" boasted the power of exorcism; was the first to introduce into Greece the custom of purifying public places and private abodes, and was deemed peculiarly successful in banishing those ominous phantoms which were so injurious to the tranquillity of the inhabitants of Athens.

Such a man was exactly the person born to relieve the fears of the Athenians, and accomplish the things dictated by the panting entrails of the sacred victims.

Accordingly (just prior to the Cirrhaean war, B.C.