--- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
>
> --- tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> according to mr. Popper's
> > recipe, as long as I
> > have not been proven wrong, the theory is a working
> > theory.
> ****GK: Ah yes. Good old Karl who "really" knew his
> Plato (:=)) Speaking of "working theories" how would
> you prove the wrongness of Mithradates substituting
> some convenient corpse for himself, becoming "Odin"
> and marching northwards and into mythology?*****
>
>
Ah, I see you have become attached to this theory for ideologigical
reasons. Well,
1) Appian et al. have vivid descriptions of his death, including his
famous suicide attempt failing because of his acquired tolerance to
poison. To go for your theory, I'd have to discard parts of those
works, other parts of which I use elsewhere. That's at least bad
style. Since this is history, these chronicles will have to stand in
for Popper's facts, and a historical theory should try to fit them as
well as possible (yes, and there are some sources that are obviously
unreasonable; but let's at last make an attempt at making
a "maximimum-compliance" theory and then see how unreasonable (or
not) it looks).
2) It seems to me that the order of those societies were based on a
secular king plus a spritual leader/high priest/ideologist (remember
the Soviet Union?). For Odin to be a runaway from Pontus, I would
have to choose one of the two roles for him while in Pontus, and
Dicineus just seemed to fit the role better than Mithridates.
But, apart from that, I wish you the best of luck with proving your
theory.
Torsten