The Twitter Herodotus

2.71 Hippopotamuses are snub-nosed, cloven-hooved, four-footed pachyderms. They're as big as the biggest oxen.

2.72 There are otters in the river. Some consider them sacred. Eels and the lepidotus are sacred among fish, the fox-goose among birds.

2.73 Another sacred bird is the phoenix. They say that it comes once in 500 years and that it carries its father's corpse to Helios' shrine.

2.74 And in Thebes there are small, horned snakes, harmless to man, that are sacred to Zeus. They are buried in Zeus' shrine when they die.

2.75 It's said that winged serpents fly to Egypt every spring, but they're killed by ibises. I've seen the snakes' bones lying in heaps.

2.76 The snake-killing ibises are black, others mostly white. The snakes' wings are like bats'. And that's it for Egypt's sacred animals!

2.77 The Egyptians, who are the 2nd most healthy people of all (after the Libyans), purge themselves for 3 days every month with emetics.

2.78 After fancy dinner parties a guy carries around a wooden statue of a corpse & reminds the guests that they'll all be dead one day too.

2.79 The Egyptians are faithful to their ancestral customs. They sing a song that honors the only son of their 1st king, who died untimely.

2.80 They share this custom with the Spartans: young men yield the road to their elders and get up from their seats when old men approach.