In this field the priest succeeds the poet. The temple itself became the chief repository of records. There were simple religious annals, votive tablets recording miracles accomplished at a shrine, lists of priests and priestesses, accounts of benefactions, of prodigies and portents. In some cases, as in Rome, the pontiffs kept a kind of register, not merely of religious history, but of important political events as well. Down to the time of the Gracchi (131 B.C.) the Pontifex Maximus inscribed the year's events upon annual tablets of wood which were preserved in the Regia, the official residence of the pontiff in the Forum. These pontifical "annals" thus came to be a sort of civic history. Chronicles of the Greek cities were commonly ascribed to mythical authors, as for instance that of Miletus, the oldest, to Cadmus the inventor of letters. But they were continued and edited by men in whom the critical spirit was awakening, as when the chroniclers of Ionian towns began the criticism of Homer. The first historians were the logographi of these Ionian cities; men who carried their inquiry (_historie_) beyond both written record and oral tradition to a study of the world around them. Their "saying" (_logos_) was gathered mostly from contemporaries; and upon the basis of a widened experience they became critics of their traditions. The opening lines of Hecataeus of Miletus begin the history of the true historic spirit in words which read like a sentence from Voltaire. "Hecataeus of Miletus thus speaks: I write as I deem true, for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me manifold and laughable." Those words mark an epoch in the history of thought. They are the introduction to historical criticism and scientific investigation. Whatever the actual achievement of Hecataeus may have been, from his time onward the scientific movement was set going. Herodotus of Heraclea struggled to rationalize mythology, and established chronology on a solid basis. And finally Herodotus, a professional story-teller, rose to the height of genuine scientific investigation. Herodotus' inquiry was not simply that of an idle tourist. He was a critical observer, who tested his evidence. It is easy for the student now to show the inadequacy of his sources, and his failure here or there to discriminate between fact and fable. But given the imperfect medium for investigation and the absence of an archaeological basis for criticism, the work of Herodotus remains a scientific achievement, as remarkable for its approximation to truth as for the vastness of its scope. Yet it was Herodotus' chief glory to have joined to this scientific spirit an artistic sense which enabled him to cast the material into the truest literary form. He gathered all his knowledge of the ancient world, not simply for itself, but to mass it around the story of the war between the east and west, the Greeks and the Persians. He is first and foremost a story-teller; his theme is like