The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

II

HERODOTUS

51

the hall of the temple and showed him wooden
statues of the high priests. The high priesthood
descends from father to son, and each high priest
sets up his own statue in his lifetime. They
counted 345 statues, and they set this genealogy
against that of Hecataeus, but they did not derive
their pedigree from a god or a hero."1
The author's motive in naming his predecessor
here is, obviously, to rally him for having "given
himself away" by stating his own genealogy and
divine ancestry to the priests. "I was not so
incautious" is the implication. But we have no
right to infer that Hecataeus had not already
drawn the sceptical conclusions which Herodotus
explains. The sceptical words with which Hecataeus introduced his Genealogies show that he was
not deaf to the lessons in history which he learned
in Egyptian temples. His very expression, when
he says that "the logoi of the Hellenes are absurd,"
not "the stories of the poets," suggests the contrast of non-Hellenes whose logoi he had compared.
The distinction of what the Greeks say from what
the Persians, Phoenicians, or Egyptians say often
recurs in Herodotus, and is an echo, I believe,
from Hecataeus.2 But we have another proof.
Herodotus cites the Egyptian priests as dating
the age of the gods in relation to the reign of
ii. 143.
2 When Herodotus cites what o'"EXX-ves say, it is sometimes assumed
that he means Hecataeus (or some other Ionian writer). In that case he
would have said ol "'Iwes. He is really quoting criticisms of Hecataeus
on o!"EXX\ves, that is, on the current mythology of epic tradition.