66 Erkki Koskenniemi must elaborately explain why Paul quotes the verse and says that the testimony is true (pp. 676–677). If Epimenides receives a role in this propaganda at all, it is a positive one: Jerome calls Epimenides ‘heroic’. (Epimenidis, cuius heroici hemistichium postea Callimachus usurpavit, Comm. in ep. ad Tit. PL 7,606). Apparently Jerome believed that Epi- menides had attacked Zeus’ cult, but Callimachus tried to protect it and modified the verse. However, the occasional attribution of the verse to Epimenides seems to be only guesswork by the Fathers33, which does not help but rather prevents us from defining the formation of the tradition. After all, it should be possible to present a better proposal. 1) The beginning of the tradition was apparently that Cretans were considered proverbial liars. The tradition seems to have been very old, be- cause Odysseus, when conceiving his origin in the Odyssey, pretends to be a Cretan34. The reputation of the Cretans as liars was boosted, because they allegedly claimed that Zeus’ tomb was on the island, which was, of course, considered the greatest of all lies. That was the reason why “Cretan liars” are mentioned so often in Greek and Latin sources (see Plutarch, Aemilius Paulus 23; Lucian, Philopseudes 3; Timon 6; Ovidius, Amores 3,10,19; Ars amatoria 1,298. Actually, κρητίζειν denoted, besides deriv- ing from Cretan dialect (Dio Chr. 11,23), mostly lying (Polyb. 8,19,5; Plut. Aem. 23,10; Plut. Lys. 20,1). The word of “Cretan liars” was thus a well-known slogan, which was used to denigrate Cretans. Apparently, the words already lived as a verse Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, which was later continued in different forms – that precisely Epimenides made it into a full-blown hexameter35 is only speculation. The early Christian tradition willingly adopted the tradition of Zeus’ tomb as truth and tried to prove that Gentile gods were only mortal men. Christians, if not Jews already before them, knew and used the tradition to rebuke idolatry. 2) If we only read the hexameter, there is no trace of a logical problem. However, in a second stage of the tradition, the slogan was used to con- struct one, when the words were attributed to a man from Crete: Does a liar tell a truth or not, when calling himself a liar? The tradition of this kind of logical problem is well attested in the Greek world, however, not in the times of the historical Epimenides, but rather since Zeno of Elea (fifth century B.C.)36. His teacher Parmenides had apparently preceded Plato and others in distinguishing between the deceptive everyday reality ZIMMER, ”Die Lügner-Antinomie in Titus 1,12“ 82. 33 Od. 13,256–286. 14,191. 19,165–202 (see A. J. HAFT, “Odysseus, Idomeneus and 34 Meriones: The Cretan Lies of Odyssey 13-19”, Classical Journal 79 [1984] 289–304). 35 QUINN, The Letter to Titus, 108. 36 On Zeno of Elea, see BODNÁR, “Epimenides”, DNP 12,2 (2002) 742-744.