부산대학교 도서관

This chapter shows that Herodotus clearly can (in some sense) distinguish true from false. He can also distinguish a story on the grounds that it is not falsifiable. However, though he may apply these tests of falsifiability or of verifiability to some ‘stories in which the chief characters are gods’, there is no reason to suppose that this category, or that of ‘stories of the distant past’, were coterminous with (or subsets of) a category of stories by definition unverifiable, and by definition unfalsifiable. The Herodotean conception and rejection of ‘myth’ are of modern construction, built upon sand and held together with wishful thinking.