by an implied comparison, not with his precursors and contemporaries, nor even with his average successors, which would be fair, but with one later writer of peculiar and almost eccentric genius, Thucydides. Thus in religious matters Herodotus is sometimes taken as a type of simple piety, even of credulity. An odd judgment. It is true that he seldom expresses doubt on any point connected with the gods, while he constantly does so in matters of human history. He veers with alacrity away from dangerous subjects, takes no liberty with divine names, and refrains from repeating stories which he called 'holy.' Of course he does so; it is a condition of his profession; the rhapsode or 'Logopoios' who acted otherwise, would soon have learn 'wisdom by suffering.' Herodotus was not a philosopher in religion; he has no theory to preach; in this, as in every other department of intellect, it is part of his greatness to be inconsistent. But there were probably few high-minded Greeks on whom the trammels of their local worships and their conventional polytheism sat less hamperingly. He has been called a monotheist; that of course he is not. But his language implies a certain background of monotheism, a moral God behind the nature-powers and heroes, almost as definitely as does that of Aeschylus or even of Plato.
Travel was a great breaker of the barriers of belief when the vital creeds of men were still really national, or cantonal, or even parochial. It is surely a man above his country's polytheism who says (ii.53) that it cannot be more than four centuries since Homer and Hesiod invented the Greek theology, and gave the gods their names, offices, and shapes! A dangerous saying for the public; but he is interested in his own speculation, and has not his audience before him. And we may surely combine
