INTRODUCTION

Somewhere in the dark a woman's fingers reach across the surface of a man's skin, feeling for something that, as it turns out, is not there. The woman is the wife of a king, and what she reaches for is a pair of ears, hidden beneath the hair of her husband in bed. When she discovers that the ears are not there she learns that her husband is not at all the man she thought he was. In another story, the daughter of a king is set up in a bedroom by her father and instructed to sleep with any man who requests it. If she is able through this method to discern the thief of her father's treasure-house, she is told to grab him and not let him go. The dutiful princess does exactly as she is told, except that, at the very moment when she discovers the thief and reaches out to grasp him in the dark, his arm comes off in her hands. She is then left alone, holding a strange extra part of a body that neither senses nor makes sense.

These two acts of feeling, of grasping for the truth in the dark, are told by Herodotus in the course of narrating the broad sweep of events that lead up to the Persian Wars. Both events are the catalysts for fairly important historical events in Persian and Egyptian history, and both lead to the transfer of power from one king to another.