SOURCE: "Deceptions and Delusions in Herodotus," Classical Antiquity, Vol. 9, No. 2, October, 1990, pp. 230-46.

[In the following excerpt, Lateiner focuses on the question of credulity and deception in the History. Lateiner notes Herodotus's admiration for ingenious trickery, but also considers, by appeal to the case of Salmoxis, his skeptical and cautious treatment of religious charlatanism.]

Not every self-interested charlatan is condemned in any society that values ingenuity. The Hellenes admired the lies of shrewd Odysseus, worshipped Hermes, patron of thieves and sharp entrepreneurs, and found admirable the hedgehog deceits and shams of Aristophanes' comic heroes.

Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy describe cheats and their dupes. After the development of history, philosophy, biography, and the later genres of the novel and hagiography at times would explore popular delusions and false prophets. History proper, from Herodotus on, supplies examples, large and small, of political, religious, and other entrepreneurs who hatch schemes at the expense of the credulous. Frauds require a knowing agent, usually one who works for his own profit or advance.

On another hand, we have unplanned delusions, as when groups share a belief in a natural or supernatural event without anyone's being the richer for it. Individual or mass delusions and panics enrich the fabric of historiography and implicitly provide lessons for the attentive audience. Herodotus certainly plays to his Greek audience's pleasure in descriptions of deception and delusion, allowing the listener's or reader's amused perception of a different reality. The responsible historian tried to separate fact from fiction, sham from truth, charlatan from dupe and clearheaded exposer of deceit.

Herodotus prizes artful deception and quick-thinking acts that promote self-preservation. Particularly when the otherwise defenseless individual outwits the powerful autocrat, or the group to be victimized outthinks the armed and threatening aggressor, Herodotus recounts in detail the survival of the (mentally) fittest. The phenomenon represents the Odyssean facet of Homeric Herodotus, indeed, but also such glorification of cleverness, moral and amoral, permeates not only Greek literature but Greek life, so far as we can reconstruct its reality as well as the response to literary representations.

In the other, but related category of popular delusions and beliefs about the supernatural, any historian can only know what he or she has been told and should refrain from quick condemnation or even condescension. Classical literature represents generally the elite's view of mass spiritual phenomena, with all the prejudices that such a situation implies. Nonempirical phenomena seemed dubious matters to Herodotus, so his accounts of gods on earth, spiritualists, and oraclemongers are critical, or at least distanced from authorial credence. Nevertheless, he includes many accounts of Greek and barbarian popular spiritual movements, and he often recounts them without recourse to explicit condemnation. Here the admired deceivers will be treated first.

THE VIRTUES OF DECEIT

Herodotus clearly admired conspicuous exemplars of human wit and presumed that Hellenic audiences would enjoy hearing tales of both ordinary and prominent men deluded, especially when their motives were ignoble and the upshot produced a form of poetic justice. … Oral informants then and now emphasize the roles of individuals, their self-serving motives, and foibles, mercenary and sexual. In an age of tyrants and despots, the whims and delusions of the mighty and the desperate maneuvers of subjects can be significant historical factors. We turn to case histories.

The Milesian adventurer Histiaeus and the Athenian politician Themistocles are prominent in any list of celebrated Herodotean swindlers. Both wily devisers of their own remarkable success are presented as conmen who can inveigle their fellow Greeks and the Persian king into complying with their self-serving schemes. Other adventurers, both petty and great, also gain their ends after promising the king easy profits or conquests. Themistocles' superiority to the competition lies in his ability to make a personal profit from a Euboean bribe or to secure his enemy's good will while actually promoting the national interests of his Athenian and Hellenic countrymen. He had a natural genius for estimating the perceived self-interest of his audiences and "to improvise what the situation at hand needed". Herodotus likes to note the good consequences of apparently immoral, impolitic, or otherwise unwise actions.

Other figures exhibit single or multiple instances of their aptitude for survival through fraud. Democedes the Crotoniate physician concocted lies for himself and a charade for Atossa that gained him freedom from Persian house arrest and eventually return to southern Italy and a rich marriage. Herodotus's amusement at the wily Italian's schemes is conveyed by the vocabulary of deceit . … , Democedes' persiflage, and elements of folk-tale comedy such as the request for a single boon and a battle over a runaway slave. In other narratives, Spartan wives disguise their Minyan spouses as women to save their lives; Macedonian men disguise themselves as women to kill the lecherous ambassadors of Persia. The motives in these cases of crossdressing deceptions are self-preservation and protecting honor. Artemisia's extraordinary skill in exploiting a lucky ruse at Salamis, whereby she escaped Greek attack and sank the ship of an ally, won Xerxes' commendation and a fortiori Herodotus's. She is acclaimed for both her strategic perception and clever impromptu survival skills. The Samians assisted Periander's three hundred eunuchs-to-be by first instructing them to take refuge from their transporters in Artemis's sanctuary and then fabricating an "ancient festival" with dances and dancers to provide the suppliants with sufficient food to prevent starvation at the hands of the furious Corinthian armed guards. The cultic evasion succeeded. Dolos is entirely appropriate to conserve lives, honor, and the deceiver's oikos, or to gain revenge. Herodotus approves, and an audience would be likely to share the Hellenocentric assumptions of his tales of deception.

There are less savory, some less justifiable traps laid, however, which also deserve mention. Political treachery … traps or attempts to trap Tomyris, the Scythian king Ariapeithes, sundry Ionian tyrants, and the entire Persian nation in the case of the Magi.

Various military deceits are admired for their effectiveness or intellectual ingenuity, for example, the way the Persian military commander Amasis trapped and captured the Barcaeans by a legal quibble and the way Thrasybulus fooled Alyattes. Herodotus dwells on the complex means by which Themistocles kept his Hellenic allies at Salamis and lured the Persians into the narrows. The Elean mantis Tellias devised a tactical ruse with a pretense of the supernatural. He had the Phocian troops near Thermopylae, his employers at the time, whiten their faces for a night attack. His fraud frightened their Thessalian foes, who fled in panic. The enemy troops thought that ghosts, … were coming against them.

Xerxes king of Persia is reported to have attempted a ruse to raise the confidence and morale of his Greek sailors after his expensive victory at Thermopylae. Trying to present the military engagement that had delayed his advance as a triumph, he dressed up many Asiatic corpses to look like Lacedaemonians, buried many others of his own (of the twenty thousand reported dead, only a thousand were left above the ground), and invited his nearby Greek naval allies to visit and view the contrived fate of his opponents. Many came, eager to sightsee; no boats were left to ferry other remaining hopefuls. However, no one was deceived by Xerxes' fraud, and in fact its clumsiness was laughed at by the perceptive Greeks. Xerxes had left the thousand Oriental troops strewn about Thermopylae, but he had had four thousand supposedly Spartan (and Thespian?) corpses heaped up in one spot (the number is suspiciously large even for this fabrication). A whole day was given up to the illusory pageant but the deceit was transparent. The improbable Greek tale reported by Herodotus served to bring Xerxes into contempt and asserts the limit of Greek gullibility, at least in the face of Persian military-political propaganda. The barbarian fraud is seen as such at once.

The Aeginetans and other Greeks, in an attempt to fool future generations about their patriotic devotion to the Hellenic cause, constructed false memorials for their allegedly nonexistent dead warriors at Plataea. … This other incident of bogus fallen warriors attests to anxiety for the historical record in the generation that fought the Persian War, and to Herodotus's noteworthy belief that the men of the Great War would bother to try to impose a false belief on future Hellenes about their accomplishments. It marks an epoch in popular historical consciousness. The historian seems obliged to discover and report falsifications of the past. …

FANTASTIC BEINGS

Herodotus denounces many accounts of meeting the unnatural or supernatural. He faults them for lack of probability, for internal illogic, or excess of logic, and twits other reporters for excessive credulity. He addresses on occasion problems of data, method, verification, and falsification. At the same time, he is reluctant to discard reports of surprising and fascinating phenomena that may be true or even seem certainly false, or to reject without record even obviously overrationalized versions of biased informants. Part of his task seems to be the preservation of local accounts and explanations that he or his sources explicitly describe as fabricated fictions, jokes, impostures, or unbelievable tall tales. Often enough he leaves the reader unsettled, without the crutch of the author's judgment. Almost always, he distances himself from reports of phantoms and miracles by identifying the responsible source or by reporting recorded logoi in indirect discourse.

Some supernatural appearances and disappearances are reported almost as if they were ordinary, because the people who related these events to Herodotus accepted their possibility. Those who first heard or read him retelling these stories of the fantastic may have enjoyed the human experience of condescending to other people's gullibility. Furthermore, Herodotus likes to recount—on the authority of others—popular stories, floating fictions that remind him of the human will to believe and foiled selfish self-interest. A huge apparition … allegedly fought opposite Epizelus the Athenian hoplite at Marathon, and another phantom, this time a female voice, was reported to have urged on the whole Hellenic fleet at Salamis. Demaratus's mother is said to have told him she had been inseminated by a phantom, the hero Astrabacus himself. Periander was reported to have successfully consulted by proxy the ghost of his wife Melissa at the Thesprotian oracle of the dead on the Acheron River.

Herodotus himself does not believe that flesh-and-blood people vanish, but he reports that Mardonius's corpse was not discovered at Plataea in 479. His reason for mentioning this fact was to record a certified fraud repeatedly perpetrated on a Persian grandee. The act of sepulture of Mardonius after the battle was fraudulently claimed by many people from various nations who obtained rich rewards from his son Artontes. …

BOGUS GODS, FALSE PRIESTS, AND SHAM MESSENGERS OF THE DIVINE

A catalogue and discussion of reputed religious fakers and charlatans in Herodotus illuminates the historian's special interest in theatrics of the supernatural and cultic pretenses. In some cases, his informants may have been even more skeptical than the historian, who is open to diverse beliefs and practices in his sources. All these stories are somehow attached to the ethnographic or historical progress, but in most of these tales of supernatural entrepreneurial enterprise, human cleverness and fallibility in private life attract Herodotus's attention rather than historical acts of political importance. The human condition with its uncertainties gains the historian's compassion and indulgence, but—no less—his amusement. Personal-interest stories elbow out national strategic concerns, at least for the moment, although some of these dramatic pretenses had long-term public consequences.

His predecessor Hecataeus of Miletus and his contemporary Hellanicus of Mytilene seem to have been shaped primarily by critical tendencies of the Ionian Enlightenment and the Sophistic Movement. These writers recorded, synthesized, and debunked accounts of geography, myth, heroic genealogy, and traditional chronologies. Neither occupied himself with the detailed description of recent major events and their causes. Therefore their subjects, largely distant in time, required them to be descriptive and then deconstructive, for instance, when "logically" separating the "historical" from the legendary Heracles or King Codrus of Athens. Hellanicus uncritically recorded various chronological lists and tried, by various compromises, to coordinate them plausibly. He also attempted to explain Attic customs by mythical precedents and etymologies. These two pre-or parahistorians had not developed a method equal to their ambition, the deconstruction of implausible tales of the distant past and the reconstruction of a reliable record. It is not clear from the scattered fragments of their books how they treated beings with spiritual pretensions, such as "Apollo-controlled" Aristeas (clearly a source for both), Pythagoras, or Salmoxis, but their intellectual orientation would not lead us to expect sympathetic accounts of supernatural claims, foreign gods, and parareligious prophets.

Those of Herodotus's narratives that are based on myth necessarily suffer from the same analytic incapacity of the Greeks to separate fully myth from history in any specific instance. His methodological advance in this area was to isolate (by various narratological devices) such interruptions of myth from the narrative of recent events and to focus on what living memory could reasonably reconstruct. Unlike Hecataeus and Hellanicus with their rationalizations, Herodotus thinks it wiser to acknowledge the possibility of some surprising coincidences and reports of the otherwise unknown than to cut every historical mystery down to common-sense proportions.

The result may be less consistent (as we shall see in his bifurcated account of Salmoxis) but more satisfactory for extracting historical sense from misunderstood or garbled accounts. In the incidents mentioned above and below, which involve supernatural claims, Herodotus the enlightened skeptic struggles with Herodotus the patient recorder of belief, practice, and memory as encountered around the world he explored.

Early in the Histories, we hear that Pisistratus and his cronies cunningly contrived … to have him escorted back to Athens by the outsized but gorgeous woman Phye from the Paeanian deme. She was outfitted and posed in glamorous disguise as the goddess Athena in epiphany. Either Athena appeared to honor her servant and promoter Pisistratus as he processed to the capital of Attica, or he piously escorted the patroness of Athens to her home on the Acropolis. Herodotus calls this sham Athena the silliest scheme by far ever … and it was successfully practiced on the usually percipient Athenians, who at this moment adored a merely human female. Herodotus points out that what separates Hellenes from barbarians is the former's superior cleverness and the absence of credulous imbecility, but he mentions this distinction here at the beginning of his History in a context where it is plainly unjustified, false, clearly undercut. He adds that the Athenians were then supposed to be supreme in cleverness even among the Hellenes, but they were completely swindled by the tyrant and his impostor. This is one of several notices that chortle at Athenian victimization.

Other explanations of this dramatic event than the one Herodotus chooses to purvey are possible, even probable. Pisistratus was a master of political propaganda, including the use of myth and religion in promoting his political interests. "Con-men" and "victims" may be prejudicial or even wrong labels for this and similar relatively small and tightly knit religious communities. Pisistratus's version of Athena may have been recognized by her peers in the fields as symbolic rather than a real goddess. The enemies of the Pisistratids and later generations may have misguidedly or, more likely, maliciously reported her to have been a successful hoax. Whatever the original event, in Herodotus's day, after more than one hundred years, such manipulation of religious ideas was deemed a real possibility. That is, religious fraud was a perceived reality.

Religious con-men and deceivers hold a venerable position of distrust in Greek literature, as Homer can show. Herodotus reports with amusement stories of the faked epiphany of Phye, the alleged ascetic and pilgrim Abaris, the reputed journey of Rhampsinitus to the land of the dead, the allegedly faked death and resurrection of Salmoxis, falsified Delphic oracles, fake Phocian ghosts, and an allegation that Del̈phonus was a pretender prophet. The skeptical empiricist usually shows little sympathy for belief in supernatural interference in earthly affairs.

Barbarians and Hellenes both fall for hocus-pocus and religious sham. Amasis shows the Egyptians that the golden idol they duly revere had once been his golden pisspot; the pharaoh serves his nation as a Sophist exposing religious impositions. Amasis refused to stay locked away always in royal pomp and to swell his dignity before his subjects, as his advisers urged, unlike the Median usurper Del̈oces, who appreciated the need to solemnize all his person and acts in order to impress his people. Amasis also ignored oracular shrines that he observed to have been wrong in attempts to predict the future.

Perialla the suborned Pythia, at the bidding of a Delphian dynast, delivers the fabricated anti-Demaratan oracles that Cleomenes wants. Later both Delphians were caught and punished. The Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes had also successfully bribed the Pythia. Barbarian Croesus accused Apollo at Delphi, the oracular god of the Greeks, of defrauding his benefactors.

The Athenian oraclemonger Onomacritus exemplifies either real life masquerading as Aristophanic comedy or, more likely, hostile Athenian oral tradition assimilating a few historical facts to the chresmologue's enemies' contemporary political fiction. According to Herodotus, in his fraudulent audacity this prophet had "edited" Musaeu's collection of oracles and inserted forged verses. Lasus, the agent of Pisistratus's sons, caught him in the act, and Hipparchus expelled him from Athens. Later in Susa the Pisistratids rediscovered his supernatural powers and praised his awesome abilities while the sham himself sang out rosy predictions for Xerxes, who was still reluctant to invade Europe. Onomacritus now prudently omitted any prophecies that boded ill for the Persian venture. The doctored prophecies persuaded Xerxes, who initially had no relish for attacking Greece, to change his mind (one of the many too many explanations that Herodotus gives for the overdetermined main event of his Histories). Flexible oral tradition and Herodotus's account utilize the skepticism of the Age of the Sophists to defame the tactics of the exiled tyrants.

In Book 4, three northerners whom Meuli, Carpenter, Dodds, and others have connected with Asiatic shamanism come into Herodotus's ken: Abaris, Aristeas, and Salmoxis. The alleged Hyperborean Abaris obtains a single parenthesis. He was reported to have gone on a long journey, to have lived without eating for long periods, and to have carried an arrow everywhere. The legend is contemptuously dismissed between Herodotus's skeptical impatience toward Delian tales of long-distance travel from the inaccessible north and toward improbable Ionian cartography with its perfect circle of Ocean, bilateral symmetry, and continental equalities too schematized for the real world.

The Greek missionary of Apollo, Aristeas, a northern nobleman of Proconnesus in the Propontis, was believed to have written an epic poem Arimaspeia about his travels to the lands of the Black Sea. Herodotus cautions the quickly credulous that the author himself of this work called himself "inspired" … and the poem was largely based on hearsay from Issedonian Scyths and made up in large part. The poet reported one-eyed Arimaspians, a nation of gold-filchers, and gold-guarding griffins, also Hyperboreans on the Northern Ocean, but did not claim eyewitness information. Herodotus acknowledges only the existence of the gold and discards the fabulous creatures, if not the rest of Aristeas's bizarre report.

Herodotus devotes more attention to a logos that he heard in Proconnesus and Cyzicus about the apparent sudden death of the same Aristeas in a fuller's shop in Proconnesus. The reported story relates that he simultaneously appeared elsewhere (shamanistic "bilocation") and conversed on the road with a Cyzicene traveling toward Proconessus. The resulting dispute, when the Cyzicene reached Proconnesus, as to whether Aristeas was alive or dead and where he then could be found, was to be settled when the family came to the locked fuller's shop to collect and prepare the corpse for burial. No Aristeas, living or dead, in one place or the other, was found, the story related.

Seven years later, Herodotus's sources continued, Aristeas the man reappeared in his home town, wrote his poem about the marvelous Arimaspians, and disappeared a second time. The Metapontines in Italy told Herodotus that he subsequently reappeared as a man in their city. Aristeas … at this time ordered them to build a statue of Aristeas and an altar to Apollo, who once had visited their city alone of all in Italy. Aristeas alleged that he had accompanied the god on that earlier journey … in the form of a raven (indeed, an avatar of Apollo). Then he disappeared a third and last time. In Italy they called him a phantom. Delphi endorsed the phantom's Apolline wishes, of course. The dedication was built as ordered and yet stood in Herodotus's day.

Aristeas's embellished legends clearly exhibit characteristics of Asiatic shamanism. The ability to bilocate, psychic excursion, appearance and disappearance at will, metamorphosis into a soul-bird, materializing of the immaterial, connections with the northern god Apollo, northern Milesian colonies, and northern travels, a lifespan of centuries and the capacity for metempsychosis, all connect Aristeas with genuine aspects of Siberian "medicine men" or ecstatic prophets, not to mention isomorphic figures of Greek legend such as Pythagoras and adjacent peoples' reincarnation myths.

Herodotus in this account collates ethnic traditions, calculates probable dates, but keeps some distance from this Wunderleben by citing his sources, keeping the tales in oratio obliqua, and dismissing without prejudice the farrago at the end … Ecstatic trances were not the material he would dwell on. Incidents that appeared more suitable to supernatural fable than fact were not entirely to be eliminated because: (a) obviously partial or inadequate sources are not thereby false; (b) Herodotus wants to report instructive stories that he does not believe to be historical; (c) spiritual reality does sometimes oddly resemble suspicious fiction.

REPUTED GOD AND DISPUTED PROPHET: THE CURIOUS CASE OF SALMOXIS

Herodotus repeatedly reminds the reader that he appreciated the historiographical difficulties of reporting religious phenomena in an objective manner. He begins his detailed account of Egyptian gods, myth, ritual, and dogma with a disclaimer and a caveat. Nevertheless his vision, … requires attention to the views of the supernatural that his subjects hold. A palmary example of his open approach is found in the account of the disputed divinity of Thracian Salmoxis.

Herodotus approaches Salmoxis in two ways. The first approach is the cool anthropologist's narration, free of polemical references to sources or personal expressions, describing the ethnology of the Getae of Thrace, "the immortalizers," men who "believe they have a recipe for escaping death." … They believe in personal immortality and that they join their Creator when they vanish from earth. They also believe in Salmoxis's own original reincarnation. Their Getic cult includes weather magic: shooting arrows at thunder and lightning. They also had a peculiar technique, reported only by Herodotus, for sending emissaries for assistance to Salmoxis now dwelling in the Great Beyond. Periodically and by lot a messenger is chosen. Some men point their spears upward; others whip the elect high up into the air by his limbs. If, when he falls on the spears, he dies, Salmoxis is deemed propitious. If the messenger lives, he himself is judged unacceptable and roundly abused. Then they try to send another winner of the Getic lottery to the Beyond. Herodotus adds at the end—parenthetically and with evident amusement— that they put in their requests for divine aid before the heavenly heave-ho, while the messenger is still alive.

More relevant material for students of charlatans is the second, cynical and garbled version of Salmoxis's story purveyed by the Hellenes of the Propontis and Pontus, "Euhemerists before Euhemerus." They said that Salmoxis was no more than a Thracian slave of Pythagoras in Samos, that he became civilized in Hellenic ways and a learned student of that very wise man's lore. He subsequently won his freedom, got rich, and went home to bring the refined Ionic way of life … to the local yokels, his poor, savage, and witless countrymen . …

Salmoxis, the story continued, after his return built a clubhouse retreat among the Getae, in which he entertained the Getan elite with ritual banquets and persuaded them … that neither he nor they and their offspring ever after would have to die, but they would come to such a place where he and the congregation would live forever and enjoy all life's good things after this mundane existence.

While carrying on his preaching, Salmoxis built an underground apartment, believing that Pythagoras's message required some validation of a supernatural sort, as the unsympathetic Greeks explained. When the hideout had been completed, Salmoxis disappeared for three years, descending into the underground dwelling … His companions missed and mourned him … They behaved as if he had died, but in the fourth year he reappeared and thus proved (without perfect logic, it may be said) the truth of his dogma … To Herodotus's Greek informants, the disappearance was a fraud practiced to gain the respect of credulous savages.

Herodotus opens and closes both the native Getic account and the reported Hellenic account that demeans the god to a slave and a hoax with distancing and disclaiming source references . … At the end, he adds a sound objection to the derisory Greek version: he believes Salmoxis lived, if he lived, long before the Samian "sophist" Pythagoras. As to Salmoxis's underground retreat, he personally does not disbelieve or believe it "a whole lot." … Whether a man Salmoxis ever existed or whether he is a local Getic daemon, Herodotus here dismisses the whole matter, presumably as a question beyond the scope of his historiography. He maintains his unique openness, equally rejecting Greek positivist reductiveness and Thracian certainties about the inhabitants of the divine realm.

The Greek account of Salmoxis is a travesty of Asiatic shamanism, however, an interpretatio Graeca of an alien religion in which Pythagoras's strangeness is used to "read" Salmoxism as it had been used by Herodotus to read Egyptian belief in 2.37 and 81 [Herodotus asserts that Greek Pythagoreanism falsely claims to have originated doctrines of metempsychosis that are really Egyption (2.123). In other words, he sooner credits the longmemoried and civlized Egyptions than the nomadic and uneducated (4.46.1) northerners. In fact, the southeastern Europeans did hold such beliefs, and Egyption religion held no such doctrine (Eliade passim, Guthrie. J. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton, 1983) 24-49, disconnects Aristea's and Abaris's ecstasy and soul-wandering from Central Asiatic shamanism]. Among the characteristics of shamanism, observe the long sleep, often the mimicry of an underworld journey; occultation or sudden disappearance and reappearance, usually the shaman's novitiate; the uncertainty of status as mortal or immortal being; the attempt to reestablish communication with the spirit world; the description of an everlasting life of bliss. This garbled Greek information ties the chapter to genuine characteristics of Dacian and Scythian religion.

Salmoxis's chief doctrine, once correction is allowed for the misunderstandings of Herodotus's Greek sources, was "a blissful postexistence," a state that required initiatory rites performed by a medium who can journey to the "other world." This symbolic death of the prophet in the Greek version marks a point of agreement with the purportedly real but beneficial death of the messengers to the beyond in the Getan version. Both accounts hold that the life beyond this one will be better and can only be reached by a special rite.

Salmoxis inaugurates a new era for Getic believers by his revelation. The occultation and return "prove" his special knowledge. Historians of religion see him as a brother god of Dionysus or a prototype for shamans. In either case Salmoxis has occult knowledge of death and special powers "peculiar especially to the Thracians and the related Balkan and Carpatho-Danubian peoples." Parallels with Pythagorean beliefs and practices are evident. Herodotus's chronological objection is sound, since the scattered and late evidence for Pythagoras's life points to a relatively late date, fl. ca. 530.

The communal banquets, the emphasis on dining, the teaching about a better reward and immortal life after death, the descent to the world of the dead or a pretense of such, show the Greek version of Salmoxis reported to Herodotus to be clearly no more than a plagiarism of Pythagoreanism, no matter what the genuine nature of the Getic cult was. These activities make an alien ritual and belief derivative from a known, docketed Greek phenomenon. The Greeks analogized alien practices, then recognized and criticized the "hoax." The Greeks found Pythagoras's doctrines and his sect already improbable, but his Ionian-Italian school's ideas and doctrines were already recognizable, by now domesticated eccentricities. The Greeks did not realize or care that the Pythagoreans' life and practices reflect various cultic acts of Greek mystery religions such as those of Eleusis, and many shamanistic features brought to the Aegean by travelers to the north.

The idiosyncratic historian Herodotus "sometimes writes for children, sometimes for philosophers," but sometimes, too, for the prudent historian. He exposes palpable frauds, mercenary, political, spiritual, and cultic, while leaving the decision on other disputable instances open [Herodotus's audience: E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (New York, 1845), ed. H. H. Milman, Vol. II, p. 57, n. 52 = ch. 24, n. 54 (Bury)]. Paranormal phenomena, Olympian epiphanies, and savage messiahs evoke his doubt, on empirical principle; but on another, quintessential principle, to wit, understanding alien and not-so-alien peoples by honestly recording their versions of the past and of eternal verities, he preserves his informants' accounts. The result, to take an example from geography and history, for the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa was the precious preservation of a startling historical achievement in exploration. The result for Salmoxis was the precious preservation of both genuine Getic cult practices and hostile Hellenic ethnocentric responses. Both the skeptical and the respectful strains in Herodotus were necessary for the difficult achievement of inventing a reliable way of doing history, preserving the fragile traces of the past.