istency. But the element of
moral freedom bears sway in the history of every people, and it was
not neglected by Polybius in the history of Rome with impunity.
His treatment of all questions, in which right, honour, religion
are involved, is not merely shallow, but radically false. The same
holds true wherever a genetic construction is required; the purely
mechanical attempts at explanation, which Polybius substitutes,
are sometimes altogether desperate; there is hardly, for instance,
a more foolish political speculation than that which derives
the excellent constitution of Rome from a judicious mixture of
monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and deduces
the successes of Rome from the excellence of her constitution.
His conception of relations is everywhere dreadfully jejune and
destitute of imagination: his contemptuous and over-wise mode of
treating religious matters is altogether offensive. The narrative,
preserving throughout an intentional contrast to the usual Greek
historiography with its artistic style, is doubtless correct and
clear, but flat and languid, digressing with undue frequency into
polemical discussions or into biographical, not seldom very self-
sufficient, description of his own experiences. A controversial
vein pervades the whole work; the author destined his treatise
primarily for the Romans, and yet found among them only a very
small circle that understood him; he felt that he remained in the
eyes of the Romans a foreigner, in the eyes of his countrymen a
renegade, and that with his grand conception of his subject he
belonged more to the future than to the present Accordingly he was
not exempt from a certain ill-humour and personal bitterness, which
frequently appear after a quarrelsome and paltry fashion in his
attacks upon the superficial or even venal Greek and the uncritical
Roman historians, so that he degenerates from the tone of the
historian to that of the reviewer. Polybius is not an attractive
author; but as truth and truthfulness are of more value than all
ornament and elegance, no other author of antiquity perhaps can
be named to whom we are indebted for so much real instruction.
His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; at the point
where they begin the veil of mist which still envelops the Samnite
and Pyrrhic wars is raised, and at the point where they end a new
and, if possible, still more vexatious twilight begins.

Roman Chroniclers

In sin