Herodotus. Book 1, Chapter 44.
44. If it was a heavy blow to the father to learn that his child was dead, it yet more strongly affected him to think that the very man whom he himself once purified had done the deed. In the violence of his grief he called aloud on Zeus Catharsius, to be a witness of what he had suffered at the stranger's hands. Afterwards he invoked the same god as Zeus Ephistius and Hetaereus. Using the one term because he had unwittingly harboured in his house the man who had now slain his son; and the other, because the stranger, who had been sent as his child's guardian, had turned out his most cruel enemy.
44. If it was a heavy blow to the father to learn that his child was dead, it yet more strongly affected him to think that the very man whom he himself once purified had done the deed. In the violence of his grief he called aloud on Zeus Catharsius, to be a witness of what he had suffered at the stranger's hands. Afterwards he invoked the same god as Zeus Ephistius and Hetaereus. Using the one term because he had unwittingly harboured in his house the man who had now slain his son; and the other, because the stranger, who had been sent as his child's guardian, had turned out his most cruel enemy.
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Text source: Herodotus. Translated by George Rawlinson, first issued in 1858. Grammar and spelling updated by Michael Presky, 1993.
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