  Since B34 opens with the phrase “and indeed…” it is likely that we do not have the whole of the remark, or all the premises from which its main conclusion was intended to follow. However, the use of the term saphes (“clear”, in the first line of the fragment) by Xenophanes’ Ionian contemporary, the historian Herodotus, provides a helpful clue to the logic of the argument. At several points in his History Herodotus speaks of what is saphes, or what can be known in a sapheôs manner, as what can be confirmed to be the case on the basis of first-hand observation: