[Esaias]

One thing I'm convinced of is that people are generally the same today as they were in ancient times: liable to intentional misrepresenting of their ideological opponents, and also liable to unintentional misrepresenting of their opponents. We see this every day here on AFF, we see it in numerous modern polemical works whether religious, political, economic, medical, etc etc.

So reports about what various people in ancient times "believed" should always be taken with a grain of salt, in my opinion. It requires some fine-toothed combing to identify and distinguish bias and error on the one hand from hints and likely truisms on the other.