Whether one speaks of history ("the course of history") or of story ("to tell a story"), one is invoking the same ancient word, ιστορία, which only later acquired these disparate meanings. "Historical" originally referred to information that cannot be inferred from known regularities and so defies prediction. We are reminded of this sense when certain subjects are referred to as "narrative arts," i.e., as arts of story-telling. A polyhistor is one who is conversant in many subjects; a histor, then, is simply "conversant." For the Greeks, history signified a literary genre — the art of telling tales, as opposed to the art of poetry — rather than a particular field of inquiry.¹