ABSTRACT
Herodotus, as we know, is both Father of History and Father of Anthropology. Sir John Myres wrote: "so far as Herodotus presents us ... with a science of anthropology ... he is little, if at all, behind the best thought of our own day."• Even as of 1908 this seems extravagant. Herodotus lacks a principle which Tylor, in the generation before Myres, had already put at the head of cultural anthropology, namely, that every culture is a "complex whole"-or, as we would say, a system. Herodotus merely notes particular traits; he is not concerned with the functional, structural or stylistic coherence of the cultures he describes.
