At that time thought deserts mythological history and its ruder form, prodigious or miraculous history, and enters earthly or human history--that is to say, the general conception that is still ours, so much so that it has been possible for an illustrious living historian to propose the works of Thucydides as an example and model to the historians of our times. Certainly that exit and that entrance did not represent for the Greeks a complete breaking with the past; and since earthly history could not have been altogether wanting in the past, so it is not to be believed that the Greeks from the sixth and seventh centuries onward should have abandoned all faith in mythology and prodigies. These things persisted not only with the people and among lesser or vulgar historiographers, but also left their traces among some of the greatest. Nevertheless, looking at the whole from above, as one should look at it, it is evident that the environment is altogether changed from what it was. Even the many fables that we read in Herodotus, and which were to be read in the logographs, are rarely (as has been justly observed) put forward ingenuously, but are usually given as by one who collects what others believe, and does not for that reason accept those beliefs, even if he does not openly evince his disbelief; or he collects them because he does not know what to substitute for them, and rather as matter for reflection and inquiry: _quæ nec confirmare argumentis neque refellere in animo est,_ as Tacitus says, when he recounts the fables of the Germans: _plura transcribo quam credo,_ declared Quintus Curtius. Herodotus is certainly not Voltaire, nor is he indeed Thucydides (Thucydides, 'the atheist'); but certainly he is no longer Homer or Hesiod.