Friday, June 18, 2021
Religious Knowledge
Herodotus 2.3.2 (tr. J. Enoch Powell):
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Now the narratives which I heard concerning the gods I am not zealous to rehearse, excepting their names alone; for I hold that all men's knowledge of them is equal.Equal to zero, I thought when I read this, and I find that my thought was anticipated by David Asheri et al., A Commentary on Herodotus, Books I-IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 244:
τὰ μέν νυν θεῖα τῶν ἀπηγημάτων οἷα ἤκουον οὐκ εἰμὶ πρόθυμος ἐξηγέεσθαι, ἔξω ἢ τὰ οὐνόματα αὐτῶν μοῦνον, νομίζων πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἴσον περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπίστασθαι.
i.e. all men have equal lack of knowledge of them.Both occurrences of αὐτῶν are masculine plural, in the judgement of Alan B. Lloyd, Herodotus, Book II: Commentary 1-98, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), p. 17, and Powell's "them" should be understood as gods, not names.
