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From: amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Herodotus and the Jews
Message-ID: <462@ihuxq.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Jan-84 14:16:31 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxq.462
Posted: Thu Jan  5 14:16:31 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Jan-84 02:49:51 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 23

Herodotus, in fairness to him, did differentiate between things that 
he had seen himself, and things that were told to him.  He also
would frequently make judgements on the reliability of things that
other people told him, and some things would get prefixed with a
remark to the effect of "You can believe this if you want to."

Also, one problem is definatly(sp?) the way that things were
transmitted at that time and even later.  I once saw a medaeval
traveller's acount of a pilgrimage that he took to the Holy Land,
with several stopovers in Africa.  There was a picture of something
that was labeled as a "cameleopardus" (giraffe to all you
unsophisticated yahoos out there, cameleopard to the sophisticated
ones), that looked like a spotted llama.  However, on reading the
description under the picture (rather difficult to do unless you
read Latin), it was obvious that the person writing the description
had actually seen a giraffe; it was just that the illustrator had
not.

				John Hobson
				AT&T Bell Labs
				Naperville, IL
				(312) 979-7293
				ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2