The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

He observed dispassionately the variety of local customs, noting that men naturally preferred the customs into which they had been born. When Darius asked his Greek subjects what he would have to pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers instead of burning them on funeral pyres, no sum could tempt them. He then sent for some Indians, who customarily ate the bodies of their deceased fathers, and asked what would induce them to burn those bodies. But not for any price would they tolerate such sacrilege. Everywhere, Herodotus said, custom is king. He was freer to speculate about beginnings and sharper in his critical sense than Christian historians would be for the next two millennia. Not boxed in by any hard dogma of the Creation, he could extend historical time back indefinitely. “Nothing is impossible,” he ventured, “in the long lapse of ages.” If the Nile should reverse its course and flow into the Red Sea, “what is there to hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost, 20,000 years?”