ABSTRACT
The religious ambience of Greece in Herodotos' formative years was one of rather superstitious belief in divine influence in, or control of, human affairs. At the most unsophisticated level, it had hardly advanced from that of the Homeric poems where direct intervention of deities both on a community scale (for example the epidemic visited by Apollo on the Greek forces) and in the individual case (a spear-cast urned aside to protect a favourite - or indeed a relative!) was the controlling influence upon single events. History as a whole, however, appeared rather to be determined by a very vaguely defined force, Fate or Necessity, against which even Zeus, Father of gods and men, on one occasion declared his impotence. (Compare the reply of the Pythia to Kroisos, 1.91 which has close epic parallels.) As we have seen in another context, the Homeric poems, the basis of primary education, continued to affect or even to shape the intellectual attitudes of fifth-century Greeks.
