Romans rendered a universal history possible. (13) This, then, is
the august motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this
Italian city from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow
strait of Messina and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the
time when Corinth in the East and Carthage in the West fell before
the resistless wave of empire and the eagles of Rome passed on the
wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules
to Syria and the Nile. At the same time he recognised that the
scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under the aegis of God's
will. (14) For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says,
the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Polybius is that
power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call
it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and
natural causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we
should say, between God's mediate and immediate government of the
world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of
Man, he will have nothing to do: still less with any idea of
chance as a factor in the phenomena of life. Chance and miracles,
he says, are mere expressions for our ignorance of rational causes.
The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a
vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a
consistent attitude of mind never argued about or even explained,
is by Polybius analysed and formulated as the great instrument of
historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet
was sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the
supernatural. He did not discuss it, but he annihilated it by