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Sourdille (H.E. 184) well summarizes the differences between Greek and Egyptian oracles, of which H. is quite unconscious. (1) All Egyptian gods, not seven (cf. c. 83) only, could prophesy; (2) but their responses were for king or priest, as representing the people, not for all, as in Greece; (3) nor had they a special μαντεῖον, apart from their ordinary temple. The oracles H. speaks of in Egypt were those of Greek settlers. χρηστηρίων. H. proceeds from the Greek gods to the Greek oracles; some of these also in Greece he thinks of Egyptian origin. The story which he gives of the founding of Dodona is a rationalization of the myth (given in c. 55). Sayce maintains (J. of P. xiv. 275) that the ‘priests in Thebes’ that H. talked with were ‘ciceroni’ connected with some temple of the Theban Amun in the north of Egypt, and that H. never was in Thebes itself. Though there is no reason to doubt H.'s veracity, the story is clearly of Greek origin; H. may have heard it in Greece, and his guides would answer in the affirmative all his ‘leading questions’; the mention of ‘Phoenician robbers’ is certainly more suited to Greeks than to natives of Upper Egypt. But Sourdille (E. pp. 175-89) thinks that there was probably a Greek community at Thebes, which had set up an oracle professing to be that of the Theban god (cf. 57. 3 n.); to this H. applied, thinking in all good faith that it was native (cf. the repeated emphasis laid on his informants, 54. 1, 55. 1), though it was really Greek. The story as to the ‘priestesses’ is an attempt to turn myth into history; it substitutes natural causes for the supernatural ones, which were, to those among whom the myths grew up, the real essence of the narrative. For a criticism of such rationalizing in H. and in Thucydides cf. Grote, i. 381 seq.
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