When Herodotus came to write his history sometime in the mid-fifth century, the medium of prose was a relatively new phenomenon: it was poetry that had dominated discourse for centuries, and had done so in a variety of genres: narrative and didactic epic, personal and choral lyric, hymns, drinking songs, oracles, and epinician odes in praise of victorious athletes. The poet in the archaic world was not usually an isolated 'artistic' figure, but instead often intimately involved in the life of his city, and he used poetry to teach and persuade, among other things. That the poet was primarily a teacher was assumed in the intellectual revolution of the sixth century, when writers such as Heraclitus and Xenophanes began to question and criticise Greek traditions by focussing especially on Homer and Hesiod - sometimes even using poetry in their own attacks. And if the biographical tradition is true, Herodotus may have known intimately about historical poetry from his uncle Panyassis who wrote a long verse epic on the foundations of Ionian cities.