ng 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 they came under
the Roman protectorate; in so far he describes it as his object to
demonstrate the fitness and reasonableness of the Roman hegemony.
In design as in execution, this history stands in clear and
distinct contrast with the contemporary Roman as well as with the
contemporary Greek historiography. In Rome history still remained
wholly at the stage of chronicle; there existed doubtless important
historical materials, but what was called historical composition
was restricted--with the exception of the very respectable but
purely individual writings of Cato, which at any rate did not reach
beyond the rudiments of research and narration--partly to nursery
tales, partly to collections of notices. The Greeks had certainly
exhibited historical research and had written history; but the
conceptions of nation and state had been so completely lost amidst
the distracted times of the Diadochi, that none of the numerous
historians succeeded in following the steps of the great Attic
masters in spirit and in truth, or in treating from a general
point of view the matter of world-wide interest in the history
of the times.

Their histories were either purely outward records, or they were
pervaded by the verbiage and sophistries of Attic rhetoric and only
too often by the venality and vulgarity, the sycophancy and the
bitterness of the age. Among the Romans as among the Greeks there
was nothing but histories of cities or of tribes. Polybius,
a Peloponnesian, as has been justly remarked, and holding
intellectually a position at least as far aloof from the Attics
as from the Romans, first stepped beyond these miserable limits,
treated the Roman materials with mature Hellenic criticism, and
furnished a history, which was not indeed universal, but which was
at any rate dissociated from the mere local states and laid hold of
the Romano-Greek state in the course of formation. Never perhaps
has any historian united within himself all the advantages of an
autho