It is because history is not only something "narrated and written," but also something "evolved and acted" that we are led to say that the history of nothing is complete. The narrative may begin and end where we please; and might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. But the beginning and the end of the action are so interwoven with the whole time process that adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the fundamental reason why Grote's history surpasses that of Herodotus in what we call historical truth. For the truth of history is a progressive truth to which the ages as they continue contribute. The truth for one time is not the truth for another, so that historical truth is something which lives and grows rather than something fixed to be ascertained once for all. To remember what has happened, and to understand it, carries us thus to the recognition that the writing of history is itself an historical process. It, too, is something "evolved and acted." It is perennially fresh even if the events with which it deals are long since past and gone. The record may be final, but our understanding of what has been recorded can make no such claim. The accuracy of the record is not the truth of history. We are well assured, for instance, that the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. The record on that point is not seriously questionable, although we have to rely on documents which have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to our own day, we can have little doubt that the record of this greater Marathon of Europe will surpass all others in fulness and accuracy. There are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, difficulties in the way of exactness even when we are dealing with contemporaneous events. "Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differently as their memories or their sympathies vary." Such difficulties we have learned how to check until our records closely approach truth of fact. Consequently the records of what men have done, or may be doing, may be relatively unimpeachable. But it is quite a different matter to understand what they have done and are doing. Without that understanding, history is no better than a chronicle, a table of events, but not that "thing to possess and keep always" after which the historian aspires.