The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an
ignorance of the true principles of research, an enthusiastic
spirit for accumulating materials with a wonderful incapacity to
use them. Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of
Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of genius
on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I
have a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene and pure air of
the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to reproduce in
his work the character of the place which gave him birth. For, of
all the historians - I do not say of antiquity but of all time -
none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief
in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling
superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek
text that cannot be reproduced](11)) which he himself is compelled
to notice as the characteristics of some of the historians who
preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less
blessed in the wondrous time of his birth. For, representing in
himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied
in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his
day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend,'
as has been said, 'more clearly than the Romans themselves the
historical position of Rome,' and to discern with greater insight
than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient
civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills,
and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, (12) the events of the world were
unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular
countries. Now, for the first time the universal empire of the