The religious interpretation of historical phenomena is not peculiar to Herodotus, but belongs to him in common with his informants and his age generally, as indeed Hoffmeister remarks (pp. 31-136): though it is remarkable to notice the frankness with which he (as well as the contemporary poets: see the references in Monk ad Euripid. Alcestis, 1154) predicates envy and jealousy of the gods, in cases where the conduct, which he supposes them to pursue, is really such as would deserve that name in a man,—and such as he himself ascribes to the despot (iii, 80): he does not think himself obliged to _call_ the gods just and merciful while he is attributing to them acts of envy and jealousy in their dealing with mankind. But the religious interpretation does not reign alone throughout the narrative of Herodotus: it is found side by side with careful sifting of fact and specification of positive, definite, appreciable causes: and this latter vein is what really distinguishes the historian from his age,—forming the preparation for Thucydides, in whom it appears predominant and almost exclusive. See this point illustrated in Creuzer, Historische Kunst der Griechen, Abschnitt iii, pp. 150-159. Jäger (Disputationes Herodoteæ, p. 16. Göttingen, 1828) professes to detect evidences of old age (senile ingenium) in the moralizing color which overspreads the history of Herodotus, but which I believe to have belonged to his middle and mature age not less than to his latter years,—if indeed he lived to be very old, which is noway proved, except upon reasons which I have already disputed in my preceding volume. See Bähr, Commentatio de Vitâ et Scriptis Herodoti, in the fourth volume of his edition, c. 6, p. 388.