he modern sense, pure and simple. Lucian has related the incident,
not only succinctly, but picturesquely.

Herodotus, then in his fiftieth year, reflected for a long while
seriously how he might, with the least trouble and in the shortest time,
win for himself and his writings a large amount of glory and reputation.
Shrinking from the fatigue involved in the labour of visiting
successively one after another the chief cities of the Athenians, the
Corinthians, and the Lacedaemonians, he ingeniously hit upon the notion
of appearing in person at the Olympian Games, and of there addressing
himself simultaneously to the very pick and flower of the whole Greek
population. Providing himself beforehand with the choicest portions or
select passages from his great narrative, he there read or declaimed
those fragments of his History to the assembled multitude from the stage
or platform of the theatre. And he did this, moreover, with such an
evident captivation about him, not only in the style of his composition,
but in the very manner of its delivery, that the applause of his hearers
interrupted him repeatedly--the close of these recitations by the great
author-reader being greeted with prolonged and resounding acclamations.
Nay, not only are these particulars related as to the First Reading
recorded as having been given by a Great Author, but, further than that,
there is the charming incident described of Thucydides, then a boy
of fifteen, listening entranced among the audience to the heroic
occurrences recounted by the sonorous and impassioned voice of the
annalist, and at the climax of it all bursting into tears. Lucian's
comment upon that earliest Reading might, with a change of names,
be applied almost word for word to the very latest of these kinds of
intellectual exhibitions. "None were ignorant," he says, "of the name
of Herodotus; nor was there a single person in Greece who had not either
seen him at the Olympics, or heard those speak of him that came from
thence: so that in what place soever he came the inhabitants pointed
with their finger, saying 'This is that Herodotus who has written the
Persian Wars in the Ionic dialect, this is he who has celebrated our
victories.' Thus the harvest which he reaped from his histories was, the
receiving in one assembly the general applause of all Greece, and the
sounding his fame, not only in one place and by a single trumpet, but
by as many mouths as there had been spectators in that