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The chosen people were forbidden to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind. These came under the designation of unclean animals, which were to be avoided. "But people have abstained from eating kinds of flesh which could not be called unclean. For example, the people of Thebes, as Herodotus tells us, abstained from sheep.
About five hundred years before the birth of our Saviour, the Greeks, sailing up the Bosphorus and braving the storms of the Black Sea, began to plant their colonies along its shores. Instructed by these colonists, Herodotus, who wrote about four hundred and forty years before Christ, gives some information respecting the then condition of interior Russia.
It is recorded by Herodotus and is represented by a frequent symbol on the Assyrian monuments. Pliny, Naturalis historia, xiii. 4. The special meaning here given to the word is explained in another work of Theophrastus, De causis plantarum, ii. 9, xv. Historia plantarum, ii. 8, iv. Herodotus i. 193.
Cadmus of Miletus is mentioned as the first historian, but his works seem to have been early lost. To him, and other Greek historians before the time of Herodotus, scholars have given the name of Logographers, from Logos, signifying any discourse in prose.
If we can believe the exaggerated traditions of the old Greek historians, the famous army of Xerxes had not less than four thousand vessels; and this number is astonishing, even when we read the account of them by Herodotus.
No one now dreams of hesitating to accept the statements of Herodotus and Thucydides as to the great sea-empire of Crete. Whoever the Minos to whom they allude may have been whether he was actually a single great historical monarch who brought the glory of the kingdom to its culmination, or whether the name was the title of a race of Kings, is a matter of small moment.
They united the priestly with the regal character; and to the descendants of a demigod a certain sanctity was attached, visible in the ceremonies both at demise and at the accession to the throne, which appeared to Herodotus to savour rather of Oriental than Hellenic origin. But the respect which the Spartan monarch received neither endowed him with luxury nor exempted him from control.
The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, before they offered in sacrifice the cow to Isis, to purify themselves from impurities, fasted and prayed. This custom he also ascribes to the Cyrenian women.
Thus the historian had a vast epic subject presented to him, which was brought to a natural and glorious termination by the defeat of the Persians in their attempts upon Greece. The work concludes with the reduction of Sestos by the Athenians, B.C. 478. Herodotus wrote in the Ionic dialect, and his style is marked by an ease and simplicity which lend it an indescribable charm.
Herodotus seems to have been well acquainted with the geography of the Caspian Sea, for he speaks of it as a Sea "quite by itself" and having no communication with any other. He considered that it was bounded on the west by the Caucasian Mountains and on the east by a great plain inhabited by the Massagetæ, who, both Arian and Diodorus Siculus think, may have been Scythians.
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