r, and arguing that a boy so well educated and so
respectably connected as Demochares (xii. 14) could never have been
guilty of that of which evil rumour accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timaeus, who had been so
unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point which he makes
against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian, is that he derived
his knowledge of history not from the dangerous perils of a life of
action but in the secure indolence of a narrow scholastic life. There
is, indeed, no point on which he is so vehement as this. 'A history,' he
says, 'written in a library gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture
of history as a painting which is copied not from a living animal but
from a stuffed one.'

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the history
of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes from books, than
there is between the scenes of real life and the fictitious landscapes of
theatrical scenery. Besides this, he enters into somewhat elaborate
detailed criticism of passages where he thought Timaeus was following a
wrong method and perverting truth, passages which it will be worth while
to examine in detail.

Timaeus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a war-horse
on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that people.
Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference is quite
unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary institutions common
to all barbarous tribes. Timaeus here, as was so common with Greek
writers, is arguing back from some custom of the present to an historical
event in the past. Polybius really is employing the comparative method,
showing how the custom was an ordinary step in the civilisation of every
early people.

In another place, {211} he shows how illogical is the scepticism of
Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by
appealing to the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in
Carthage; pointing out how impossible it was, on any other theory except
that it belonged to Phalaris, to account for the presence in Carthage of
a bull of this peculiar character with a door between his shoulders. But
one of the great points which he uses against this Sicilian historian is
in reference to the question of the origin of the Locrian colony. In
accordance with the received tradition on the subject, Aristotle had
represented the Locri