Herodotus' The History

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and the West. The East, represented by the Persian Empire, signified tyranny and oppression. The West, represented by the Greek city-states, signified freedom. As Herodotus interprets the Persian Wars we see the beginnings of Western Civilization and the association of that tradition with freedom.
The Greeks had always been aware that foreign, barbarian peoples worshipped different gods and had customs different from their own. The rise of ethnographic studies, however, encouraged a systematic examination of the nature of human culture and society. To the Greeks this suggested that customs which they had always taken to be founded in immutable divine power, sanctioned by the Olympian gods, were in fact merely human inventions which other societies either ignored or directly contravened. Herodotus’ framework, in The History, is that of Greek interest. He provides a series of assumptions of Greek practice that can be contrasted with barbarian modes of behavior.
Herodotus’ description ...

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and their strange gods in comparison with the Greek religion. For example, Herodotus discusses a series of key Greek ideas toward sacrifices; the expectation that blood will be shed, that meat will be boiled over wood, that animals rather than humans will be killed, that wine will be used, that there will be an act of pouring, etc. However, in Sctythia these traditions are foreign: animals are killed by strangulation rather than by knife, the carcasses may be roasted over burning bones rather than wood, and the victim is sometimes human, the wine is poured over the human victims head. (The History of Herodotus, Grene, Book 4.60-4).
Their excessive wealth as noted in Herodotus’ ...

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