Epimenides

Epimenides was a Cretan holy man and poet, said to have lived around the 6th century BCE. Ancient writers credit him with religious poems, including a Theogony, and say the Athenians called him in to purify their city from a curse. Some scholars see him as a shaman-like figure, and much of his biography may be legend.

The best-known story, told by Diogenes Laertius, is that as a boy he was sent to look for a sheep, lay down in a cave at midday and slept for 57 years. When he woke he went on looking for the sheep and found everything changed, and his younger brother an old man.

He is also credited with the line that Cretans are always liars, which the New Testament Letter to Titus quotes from 'one of their own prophets'. Because a Cretan said it, logicians later turned it into the liar paradox.

His long sleep is one of several ancient stories of a man who sleeps for decades, alongside Honi the Circle-Drawer in Jewish tradition, the man of Surah 2:259 in the Quran, and the Seven Sleepers.