Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his great master,
showed were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of
brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain for
him? Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late to be
original. To Thucydides belongs the honour of being the first in the
history of Greek thought to discern the supreme calm of law and order
underlying the fitful storms of life, and Plato and Aristotle each
represents a great new principle. To Polybius belongs the office--how
noble an office he made it his writings show--of making more explicit the
ideas which were implicit in his predecessors, of showing that they were
of wider applicability and perhaps of deeper meaning than they had seemed
before, of examining with more minuteness the laws which they had
discovered, and finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had
done the range of science and the means it offered for analysing the
present and predicting what was to come. His office thus was to gather
up what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider
application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the Philosophy
of history appears next, as in Plutarch's tract on 'Why God's anger is
delayed,' the pendulum of thought had swung back to where it began. His
theory was introduced to the Romans under the cultured style of Cicero,
and was welcomed by them as the philosophical panegyric of their state.
The last notice of it in Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who
alludes to the stable polity formed out of these elements as a
constitution easier to commend than to produce and in no case lasting.
Yet Polybius had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had
prophesied the rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the
ochlocracy fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian
household over the birth of that boy who, borne to power as the champion
of the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the means by
which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history. The principle
of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well as in organic life:
Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal ancestors of Fichte and
Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out those
grea