Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian's
being contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the
historian is a mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true. But
to appreciate the harmony and rational position of the facts of a
great epoch, to discover its laws, the causes which produced it and
the effects which it generates, the scene must be viewed from a
certain height and distance to be completely apprehended. A
thoroughly contemporary historian such as Lord Clarendon or
Thucydides is in reality part of the history he criticises; and, in
the case of such contemporary historians as Fabius and Philistus,
Polybius in compelled to acknowledge that they are misled by
patriotic and other considerations. Against Polybius himself no
such accusation can be made. He indeed of all men is able, as from
some lofty tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient
world, the triumph of Roman institutions and of Greek thought which
is the last message of the old world and, in a more spiritual
sense, has become the Gospel of the new.

One thing indeed he did not see, or if he saw it, he thought but
little of it - how from the East there was spreading over the
world, as a wave spreads, a spiritual inroad of new religions from
the time when the Pessinuntine mother of the gods, a shapeless mass
of stone, was brought to the eternal city by her holiest citizen,
to the day when the ship CASTOR AND POLLUX stood in at Puteoli, and
St. Paul turned his face towards martyrdom and victory at Rome.
Polybius was able to predict, from his knowledge of the causes of
revolutions and the tendencies of the various forms of governments,
the uprising of that democratic tone of thought which, as soon as a
seed is sown in the murder of the Gracchi and the exile of Marius,
culminated as all democratic movements do culminate, in the supreme