[Footnote 1: Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, I., 299; III., 183-185.] [Footnote 2: Exod. 39: 8-21; Lev. 8: 8.] [Footnote 3: Bunsen's _Egypt's Place in Universal History_, V., 254.] [Footnote 4: Wilkinson's _Anc. Egyp_., III., 15-17.] [Footnote 5: Budge's _The Dwellers on the Nile_, p. 131.] Among the ancient Greeks the practice of lying was very general, so general that writers on the social life of the Greeks have been accustomed to give a low place relatively to that people in its estimate of truthfulness as a virtue. Professor Mahaffy says on this point: "At no period did the nation ever attain that high standard which is the great feature in Germanic civilization. Even the Romans, with all their coarseness, stood higher in this respect. But neither in Iliad nor in Odyssey is there, except in phrases, any reprobation of deceit as such." He points to the testimony of Cicero, concerning the Greeks, who "concedes to them all the high qualities they choose to claim save one--that of truthfulness."[1] Yet the very way in which Herodotus tells to the credit of the Persians that they allowed no place for the lie in their ethics[2] seems to indicate his apprehension of a higher standard of veracity than that which was generally observed among his own people. Moreover, in the Iliad, Achilles is represented as saying: "Him I hate as I do the gates of Hades, who hides one thing in his heart and utters another;" and it is the straightforward Achilles, rather than "the wily and shiftful Ulysses," who is the admired hero of the Greeks.[3] Plato asserts, and argues in proof of his assertion, that "the veritable lie ... is hated by all gods and men." He includes in the term "veritable lie," or "genuine lie," a lie in the soul as back of the spoken lie, and he is sure that "the divine nature is incapable of a lie," and that in proportion as the soul of a man is conformed to the divine image, the man "will speak, act, and live in accordance with the truth."[4] Aristotle, also, while recognizing different degrees of veracity, insists that the man who is in his soul a lover of truth will be truthful even when he is tempted to swerve from the truth. "For the lover of truth, who is truthful where nothing is at stake [or where it makes no difference], will yet more surely be truthful where there is a stake [or where it does make a difference]; for he will [then] shun the lie as shameful, since he shuns it simply because it is a lie."[5] And, again, "Falsehood abstractly is bad and blamable, and truth honorable and praiseworthy; and thus the truthful man being in the mean is praiseworthy, while the false [in either extreme, of overstating or of understating] are both blamable, but the exaggerating man more so than the other."[6] [Footnote 1: Mahaffy's _Social Life in Greece_, pp. 27, 123. See also Fowler's _Principles of Morals_, II., 219-221.] [Footnote 2: _Hist_., Bk. I., §139.]