where Herodotus says god intervenes.^29 This, however, is a category mistake, con-
fusing “myth” with “religion.” Herodotus can perfectly well think that he can use
evidence to discern patterns of divine action in recent or contemporary history;^30
this is very different from his thinking that he can get information of the kind he
wants from the material of myth, which had been, as we have seen, long since pre-
cipitated out by his culture as occupying its own discrete and internally layered
time dimension.
A very important part, then, of what Herodotus will claim as knowledge is
bound up with an apprehension of time. This apprehension of time will of course
vary depending on what part of his world he is talking about at any given moment,
so that it is a mistake to imagine Herodotus working with some single yardstick he
may lay across diverse times in order to form one line of demarcation.^31 After our
first two chapters it should be plain that no one in the ancient world, let alone the
first person to write history, could conceive of time as an absolute and continuous
essence in which all parts of the world seamlessly participate. Thanks in particular
to his Egyptian informants, Herodotus thinks he is in a better position to say
authoritative things about very distant events and persons in Egypt than in
Greece.^32 The difference between Egyptian and Greek time is one of quantity, in
terms of depth, but this quantitative difference is so great that it translates into
qualitative terms, giving Egyptian time a plotted-out texture that is incomparably
superior to that of Greek time in its reach.^33
The epistemological criterion is by no means the only one that matters to
Herodotus as he grapples with demarcating his material from the material of myth.
A highly revealing moment comes in the passage we have already quoted, in which
he says that “Polycrates is the first of the Greeks of whom we know who had the
plan of ruling the sea, apart from Minos the Cretan” (3.122.2). In his last book,
Truth and Truthfulness,in the course of a bracing chapter on the concept of the his-
toric past in Herodotus and Thucydides, Bernard Williams demolishes the struc-
ture of “time of gods” and “time of men” that has sometimes been built upon mis-
translations of the phrase Herodotus uses to describe Polycrates. He is “the first of
the Greeks of whom we know,” says Herodotus, “apart from Minos the Cretan and
any other person before him who ruled the sea — of the so-called human race
Polycrates was first.” The phrase translated here as “so-called human race,” th'"
ajnqrwphivh" legomevnh" geneh'", has often been mistranslated as “human time” or
“human epoch” or something of the kind, meanings it cannot bear, as Williams
shows.^34 Williams finely demonstrates that Herodotus knows there is “something
wrong with Minos,” but he is not exactly sure what. He has not fully distinguished
Stratifying Time: Herodotus. 75