cal position of Rome more clearly than
the Romans of that day could themselves. From the place which
he occupied, a Greek statesman and a Roman prisoner, esteemed and
occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus
and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had
so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and
the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into
the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture. Thus Polybius
became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious
conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and
recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect
and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts,
regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which
people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit. In this
spirit he acted as a practical statesman, and wrote his history.
If in his youth he had done homage to the honourable but
impracticable local patriotism of the Achaeans, during his later
years, with a clear discernment of inevitable necessity, he
advocated in the community to which he belonged the policy of the
closest adherence to Rome. It was a policy in the highest degree
judicious and beyond doubt well-intentioned, but it was far from
being high-spirited or proud. Nor was Polybius able wholly to
disengage himself from the vanity and paltriness of the Hellenic
statesmanship of the time. He was hardly released from exile,
when he proposed to the senate that it should formally secure to
the released their former rank in their several homes; whereupon
Cato aptly remarked, that this looked to him as if Ulysses were to
return to the cave of Polyphemus to request from the giant his hat
and girdle. He often made use of his relations with the great
men in Rome to benefit his countrymen; but the way in which he
submitted to, and boasted of, the illustrious protection somewhat
approaches fawning servility. His literary activity breathes
throughout the same spirit as his practical action. It was
the task of his life to write the history of the union of the
Mediterranean states under the hegemony of Rome. From the first
Punic war down to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth his work
embraces the fortunes of all the civilized states--namely Greece,
Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and Italy--and
exhibits in causal connection the mode in which t