more important than that which rests on psychological probability.

Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the
presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he
says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they
and their children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and
as regards the authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his
poem show that he knew of Helen's sojourn in Egypt during the
siege, but selected the other story as being a more suitable motive
for an epic. Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae
family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to
Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever
have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of
Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A
shield, he acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly
have been done by such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon;
nor will he believe that a great king like Rhampsinitus would have
sent his daughter [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of
probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been
rich enough to build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological
grounds the story is impossible (ii. 134).

In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the
forcible entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god's
mother, which seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight
where sticks were freely used ([Greek text which cannot be