HKB
ii. 45.) From what Egyptian this story proceeds, I know not. For, on the contrary, many honors are even at this day given by the Egyptians to Helen and Menelaus.
The same Herodotus, that he may still be like himself, says that the Persians learned the defiling of the male sex from the Greeks. (Ibid, i. 135.) And yet how could the Greeks have taught this impurity to the Persians, amongst whom, as is confessed by many, boys had been castrated before ever they arrived in the Grecian seas? He writes also, that the Greeks were instructed by the Egyptians in their pomps, solemn festivals, and worship of the twelve gods; that Melampus also learned of the Egyptians the name of Dionysus (or Bacchus) and taught it the other Greeks; that the mysteries likewise and rites of Ceres were brought out of Egypt by the daughters of Danaus; and that the Egyptians were wont to beat themselves and make great lamentation, but yet he himself refused to tell the names of their deities, but concealed them in silence. As to Hercules and Bacchus, whom the Egyptians named gods, and the Greeks very aged men, he nowhere has such scruples and hesitation; although he places also the Egyptian Hercules amongst the gods of the second rank, and Bacchus amongst those of the third, as having had some beginning of their being and not being eternal, and yet he pronounces those to be gods; but to the gods Bacchus and Hercules, as having been mortal and being now demi-gods, he thinks we ought to perform anniversary solemnities, but not to sacrifice to them as to gods. The same also he said of Pan, overthrowing the most venerable and purest sacrifices of the Greeks by the proud vanities and mythologies of the Egyptians. (For the passages referred to in this chapter, see Herodotus, ii. 48, 51, 145, 146, 171.)
Nor is this impious enough; but moreover, deriving the pedigree of Hercules from Perseus, he says that Perseus was an Assyrian, as the Persians affirm. "But the leaders," says he, "of the Dorians may appear to be descended in a right line from the Egyptians, reckoning their ancestors from before Danae and Acrisius." (Herodotus, vi. 53, 54.) Here he has wholly passed by Epaphus, Io, Iasus, and Argus, being ambitious not only to make the other Herculeses Egyptians and Phoenicians but to carry this also, whom himself declares to have been the third, out of Greece to the barbarians. But of the ancient learned writers, neither Homer, nor Hesiod, nor Archilochus, nor Pisander, nor Stesichorus, nor Alcman, nor Pindar, makes any mention of the Egyptian or the Phoenician Hercules, but all acknowledge this our own Boeotian and Argive Hercules.