Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

Or, you know, but I also saw this and that actually proves it wrong.

Or, you know, just using some basic logic or some other information or just to add a sprinkle bit of doubt on these stories, just to be like, I'm not sure that this is actually true.

And a lot of that is, to some extent, is relativism, right?

It's this idea of when you talk to many people, you get different versions of a lot of different stories and you will never know which one is true, right?

Or you will never be able to determine whether there is a single truth or whether there's just all these different versions that suit different people, different agents.

There's also this element of, do we really know?

Who are we to say what the truth is?

There's explicitly some stories that try to make this point.

He has a very famous anecdote about how the Persian king supposedly brought together Greeks and Indians from opposite ends of his empire to essentially say, what do you do with the dead?

Because apparently their habits were opposite.

The Greeks burned them and the Indians ate them.

Supposedly.

And this is obviously just a story.

I know we don't really believe this, but there are obviously ways in which you can say, okay, this maybe goes back to some real origin story.

And the idea is that the Persian king then told them, okay, the Greeks, now you must eat your dead and the Indians, you must burn them.

And they were both completely outraged by the idea that we should do this because they both believe very strongly that they were doing right by their ancestors and they were doing right by the deceased.

And they absolutely refused to believe that any other way could be true one, but they were in direct opposition to each other.

Herodotus tells this story to kind of indicate more broadly that there are so many different ways of living in the world and there isn't a single one that is right.

So he does know more than I think most of the other authors of his time.

He has a much broader worldview, partly because of his travels and partly because that is what he's interested in.