Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the
stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier
to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius
had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the
rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy
fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household
over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of
the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the
means by which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history.
The principle of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well
as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal
ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu
and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out
those great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of
this spirit of historical criticism, I shall pass over those
annalists and chroniclers who intervened between Thucydides and
Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light on the real
nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other
forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character
and rise of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific
study of history which cause such a wide gap between these two
historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the
Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena
for the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific