Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Zalmoxis" in Romanian language version.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who produced his famous History in the mid-fifth century BC, is the most informative of the surviving classical authors in terms of his descriptions of non-literate societies, but there has been considerable disagreement over the trustworthiness of his account. Many scholars have, with Thucydides, cast Herodotus in the role of 'Father of Lies' or, with greater sophistication, characterized his stories, in the light of literary critical theory, primarily as manifestations of the Greek mind and Greek categories, rather than reflections on an objective reality which are still useful today; the classicist François Hartog has argued most eloquently for such a reading in relation to Herodotus' Scythians, whom he terms 'Les Scythes Imaginaires'.
