The time when Herodotus saw the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thêbes can hardly have been earlier than 450 B. C. reckoning upwards from hence to 776 B. C., we have an interval of 326 years: the inscriptions which Herodotus saw may well therefore have been _ancient_, without being earlier than the first recorded Olympiad. Mr. Clinton does, indeed, tell us that _ancient_ “may perhaps” be construed as 400 years earlier than Herodotus. But no careful reader can permit himself to convert such bare possibility into a ground of inference, and to make it available, in conjunction with other similar possibilities before enumerated, for the purpose of showing that there really existed inscriptions in Greece of a date anterior to 776 B. C. Unless Mr. Clinton can make out this, he can derive no benefit from inscriptions, in his attempt to substantiate the reality of the mythical persons or of the mythical events. The truth is, that the Herakleid pedigree of the Spartan kings (as has been observed in a former chapter) is only one out of the numerous divine and heroic genealogies with which the Hellenic world abounded,[75]—a class of documents which become historical evidence only so high in the ascending series as the names composing them are authenticated by contemporary, or nearly contemporary, enrolment. At what period this practice of enrolment began, we have no information. Two remarks, however, may be made, in reference to any approximative guess as to the time when actual registration commenced: First, that the number of names in the pedigree, or the length of past time which it professes to embrace, affords no presumption of any superior antiquity in the time of registration: Secondly, that, looking to the acknowledged paucity and rudeness of Grecian writing, even down to the 60th Olympiad (540 B. C.), and to the absence of the habit of writing, as well as the low estimate of its value, which such a state of things argues, the presumption is, that written enrolment of family genealogies, did not commence until a long time after 776 B. C., and the obligation of proof falls upon him who maintains that it commenced earlier. And this second remark is farther borne out, when we observe that there is no registered list, except that of the Olympic victors, which goes up even so high as 776 B. C. The next list which O. Müller and Mr. Clinton produce, is that of the Karneonicæ, or victors at the Karneian festival, which reaches only up to 676 B. C. [75] See the string of fabulous names placed at the head of the Halikarnassian Inscription, professing to enumerate the series of priests of Poseidôn from the foundation of the city (Inscript. No. 2655, Boeckh), with the commentary of the learned editor: compare, also, what he pronounces to be an inscription of a genealogy partially fabulous at Hierapytna in Krête (No. 2563).