scientific with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the eagle-
flight of speculation, to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul
impatient of those slower and surer inductive methods which
Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his greater 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