l criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an ignorance of
the true principles of research, an enthusiastic spirit for accumulating
materials with a wonderful incapacity to use them. Not among the hot
sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of Athens, but from the very heart of
Greece rises the man of genius on whose influence in the evolution of the
philosophy of history I have a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene
and pure air of the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to
reproduce in his work the character of the place which gave him birth.
For, of all the historians--I do not say of antiquity but of all
time--none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief
in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling
superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek] {197a})
which he is compelled to notice himself as the characteristics of some of
the historians who preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him,
he was no less blessed in the wondrous time of his birth. For,
representing in himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect
and allied in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of
his day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend,' as
has been said, 'more clearly than the Romans themselves the historical
position of Rome,' and to discern with greater insight than all other men
could those two great resultants of ancient civilisation, the material
empire of the city of the seven hills, and the intellectual sovereignty
of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, {197b} the events of the world were
unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular
countries. Now, for the first time the universal empire of the Romans
rendered a universal history possible. {198a} This, then, is the august
motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this Italian city from
the day when the first legion crossed the narrow strait of Messina and
landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the time when Corinth in the
East and Carthage in the West fell before the resistless wave of empire
and the eagles of Rome passed on the wings of universal victory from
Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules to Syria and the Nile. At the same
time he recognised that the scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under
the aegis of God's will. {198b} For, as one of the Middle Age scribes
most truly says, the [G