this with his passing comment on the Egyptian theologies, that (ii.3) "about the gods one man knows as much as another." There is evident sympathy in his account of the Persian religion as opposed to the Greek: "Images and temples and altars it is not in their law to set up-nay, they count them fools who make such, as I judge, because they do not hold the gods to be man-shaped, as the Greeks do. Their habit is to sacrifice to Zeus, going up to the tops of the highest mountains, holding all the round of the sky to be Zeus." "They sacrifice," he goes on, "to sun, moon, earth, fire, water, and the winds." The feeling of that passage (i.131) expresses the true Greek polytheism, freed from the accidents of local traditions and anthropomorphism. If you press Herodotus or the average unsacerdotal Greek, he falls back on a One behind the variety of nature and history; but what comes to him naturally is to feel a divine element here, there, and everywhere, in winds and waters and sunlight and all that appeals to his heart-to single out each manifestation of it, and to worship it there and then.
It is fair to lay stress on these passages rather than on those where Herodotus identifies various foreign deities with known Greek ones under the conventional names (Neith-Athena, Alilat-Ourania, Chem-Pan), or where, after a little excursus into the truth about the life of Heracles, and a conclusion that there were two people of the same name, he prays "the gods and heroes" to take no offence (ii.43). In those cases he is speaking the language of his audience; and perhaps, also, the 'safe' professional attitude has become a second nature to him.
With prophecies and omens and the special workings of Providence, the case is different. He is personally
