been unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point
which he makes against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian,
is that he derived his knowledge of history not from the dangerous
perils of a life of action but in the secure indolence of a narrow
scholastic life. There is, indeed, no point on which he is so
vehement as this. 'A history,' he says, 'written in a library
gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture of history as a
painting which is copied not from a living animal but from a
stuffed one.'

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the
history of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes
from books, than there is between the scenes of real life and the
fictitious landscapes of theatrical scenery. Besides this, he
enters into somewhat elaborate detailed criticism of passages where
he thought Timaeus was following a wrong method and perverting
truth, passages which it will be worth while to examine in detail.

Timaeus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a
war-horse on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that
people. Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference
is quite unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary
institutions common to all barbarous tribes. Timaeus here, as was
common with Greek writers, is arguing back from some custom of the
present to an historical event in the past. Polybius really is
employing the comparative method, showing how the custom was an
ordinary step in the civilisation of every early people.

In another place, (21) he shows how illogical is the scepticism of
Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by