Essays and Lectures | Page 7

Troy. Had she been there, he says,
Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek text
which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they and their
children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and as regards the
authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his poem show that he
knew of Helen's sojourn in Egypt during the siege, but selected the
other story as being a more suitable motive for an epic. Similarly he
does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae family, a family who had
always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to Harmodios and
Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever have been so
treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of Marathon as a
signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A shield, he acknowledges,

was held up, but it could not possibly have been done by such friends
of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon; nor will he believe that a great
king like Rhampsinitus would have sent his daughter [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced].
Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of probability; a
Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been rich enough to
build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological grounds the story is
impossible (ii. 134).
In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the forcible entry
of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god's mother, which seems
to have been a sort of religious faction fight where sticks were freely
used ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), 'I feel sure,' he says,
'that many of them died from getting their heads broken,
notwithstanding the assertions of the Egyptian priests to the contrary.'
There is also something charmingly naive in the account he gives of the
celebrated Greek swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to
give his countrymen warning of the Persian advance. 'If, however,' he
says, 'I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in
a boat.'
There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the instances I
have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands on the
borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note even the
most minute instances of the rise of the critical and sceptical spirit of
inquiry.
How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown by
a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic tests to
matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed, grapples with the
moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek Bible; and where he
rejects as incredible the marvellous achievements of Hercules in Egypt,
he does so on the express grounds that he had not yet been received
among the gods, and so was still subject to the ordinary conditions of
mortal life ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]).
Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems to
have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage (ii. 45)
concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for having gone
so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of course, that in which he
rejects the mythical account of the foundation of Dodona. 'How can a

dove speak with a human voice?' he asks, and rationalises the bird into
a foreign princess.
Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at the
beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric causes,
and not in consequence of the incantations of the MAGIANS. He calls
Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an inspired
prophet, 'a clever man who had acquired for himself the art of
prophecy'; and as regards the miracle told of the AEginetan statues of
the primeval deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they fell on their knees
when the sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry them off, 'any one may
believe it,' he says, 'who likes, but as for myself, I place no credence in
the tale.'
So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism, as far as
it appears explicitly in the works of this great and philosophic writer;
but for an adequate appreciation of his position we must also note how
conscious he was of the value of documentary evidence, of the use of
inscriptions, of the importance of the poets as throwing light on
manners and customs as well as on historical incidents. No writer of
any age has more vividly recognised the fact that history is a matter of
evidence, and that it is as necessary for the historian to state his
authority as it is to produce one's witnesses in a court of law.