He was also distinguished as a reciter, and on a visit to the United States in 1871 read extracts from his works before large audiences.
We can only suppose that the lyre in the hands of the epic poet or reciter was in reality a piece of convention, a " survival " from the stage in which narrative poetry had a lyrical character.
It was not until two centuries later that the historikos, the reciter of stories, superseded the historeon (to-Top&w), the seeker after knowledge.
Herodotus himself was as much a scientific explorer as a reciter of narrative, and his life-long investigation was historie in his Ionian speech.
Telling of stories was a recognized form of entertainment at all feasts and gatherings, and it was the necessity of the reciter which gradually worked them into a regular form, by which the memory was relieved and the artistic features of the story allowed to be more carefully elaborated.
