II GR?CO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

After what we have said as to the nature of periodization,[1] the usual custom, to which I too bow here, of beginning the history of historiography with that of the Greeks, and with the Greeks of the fifth or sixth century before Christ, will be taken for what it is really worth, but it must not be thought that we thus intend to announce the beginning of historiography, its first appearance in the world, when, on the contrary, all we wish to say is that our interest in the investigation of its course becomes more vivid at that point. History, like philosophy, has no historical beginning, but only an ideal or metaphysical beginning, in so far as it is an activity of thought, which is outside time. Historically speaking, it is quite clear that prior to Herodotus, prior to the logographs, prior indeed to Hesiod and to Homer, history was already, because it is impossible to conceive of men who do not think and do not narrate their deeds in some way or other. This explanation might seem to be superfluous if the confusion between historical beginning and ideal beginning had not led to the fancy of a 'first philosophical step,' made by Thales or Zeno, or by somebody else, by means of which thinking the first stone is supposed to have been laid, as it was believed that by thinking another last step the pinnacle of the edifice of philosophy was or would be attained. But Thales and Herodotus should really be called rather the 'sons' of our interest in the development of those[Pg 182] disciplines than the 'fathers' of philosophy and history, and it is we whom those sons salute as their 'fathers.' We have not usually much interest in what occurred prior to them or among people more distant than they from our point of view, not only because there is a scarcity of surviving documents concerning them, but above all because they are forms of thought which have but little connexion with our own actual problems.

From its point of view, too, the distinction that we laid down between history and philology suggests refraining from the search hitherto made for the beginnings of Gr?co-Roman historiography by means of composing lists of magistrates and of adding to these brief mention of wars, treatises, embassies from colonies, religious festivities, earthquakes, inundations, and the like, in the ?ροι and in the annales pontificum, in archives and museums made in temples, or indeed in the chronological nails fixed to the walls, spoken of by Perizonius. Such things are extrinsic to historiography and form the precedent, not of it, but of chronicle and philology, which were not born for the first time in the nineteenth or seventeenth century, or at any rate during the Alexandrine period, but belong to all times, for in all times men take note of what they remember and attempt to preserve such memorials intact, to restore and to increase them. The precedent of history cannot be something different from history, but is history itself, as philosophy is the precedent of philosophy and the living of the living. Nevertheless the thought of Herodotus and of the logographs really does unite itself with religions, myths, theogonies, cosmogonies, genealogies, and with legendary and epical tales, which were not indeed poetry, or were not only poetry but also thoughts—that is to say, metaphysics and histories.[Pg 183] The whole of later historiography developed from them by a dialectical process, for which they supplied the presuppositions—that is to say, concepts, propositions of fact and fancy mingled, and with that the stimulus better to seek out the truth and to dissipate fancies. This dissipation took place more rapidly at the time which it is usual to fix by convention as the beginning of Greek historiography.

At that time thought deserts mythological history and its ruder form, prodigious or miraculous history, and enters earthly or human history—that is to say, the general conception that is still ours, so much so that it has been possible for an illustrious living historian to propose the works of Thucydides as an example and model to the historians of our times. Certainly that exit and that entrance did not represent for the Greeks a complete breaking with the past; and since earthly history could not have been altogether wanting in the past, so it is not to be believed that the Greeks from the sixth and seventh centuries onward should have abandoned all faith in mythology and prodigies. These things persisted not only with the people and among lesser or vulgar historiographers, but also left their traces among some of the greatest. Nevertheless, looking at the whole from above, as one should look at it, it is evident that the environment is altogether changed from what it was. Even the many fables that we read in Herodotus, and which were to be read in the logographs, are rarely (as has been justly observed) put forward ingenuously, but are usually given as by one who collects what others believe, and does not for that reason accept those beliefs, even if he does not openly evince his disbelief; or he collects them because he does not know what to substitute for them, and rather as matter for reflection[Pg 184] and inquiry: qu? nec confirmare argumentis neque refellere in animo est, as Tacitus says, when he recounts the fables of the Germans: plura transcribo quam credo, declared Quintus Curtius. Herodotus is certainly not Voltaire, nor is he indeed Thucydides (Thucydides, 'the atheist'); but certainly he is no longer Homer or Hesiod.

The following are a few examples of leading problems which ancient historians had before them, dictated by the conditions and events of Greek and Roman life; they were treated from a mental point of view, which no longer found in those facts episodes of the rivalry of Aphrodite and Hera (as formerly in the Trojan War), but varying complex human struggles, due to human interests, expressing themselves in human actions. How did the wars between the Greeks and the Persians originate and develop? What were the origins of the Peloponnesian War? of the expedition of Cyrus against Artaxerxes? How was the Roman power formed in Latium, and how did it afterward extend in Italy and in the whole world? How did the Romans succeed in depriving the Carthaginians of the hegemony of the Mediterranean? What were the political institutions developed in Athens, Rome, and Sparta, and what form did the social struggle take in those cities? What did the Athenian demos, the Roman plebs, the eupatrides, and the patres desire? What were the virtues, the dispositions, the points of view, of the various peoples which entered into conflict among themselves, Athenians, Lacedemonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Gauls, and Germans? What were the characters of the great men who guided the destinies of the peoples, Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio? These problems were solved in a series of classical[Pg 185] works by Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, etc., and they will certainly not be blamed for failing to exhaust their themes—that is, for failing to sound the bottom of the universe, because there is no sounding the bottom of the universe—nor because they solve those problems only in the terms in which they had proposed them, neither more nor less than as we solve the problems of our day in our own terms. Nor must we forget that since modern historiography is still much as it was left by the Greeks, the greater part of those events are still thought as they were by the ancients, and although something has been added and a different light illumines the whole, the work of the ancient historians is preserved in our own: a true "eternal possession," as Thucydides intended that his history should be.

And just as historical thought had become invigorated in its passage from the mythological to the human stage, so did research and philology grow. Herodotus was already travelling, asking questions, and listening to answers, distinguishing between the things that he had seen with his own eyes and those which depended upon hearsay, opinion, and conjecture; Thucydides was submitting to criticism different traditions relating to the same fact, and even inserting documents in his narrative. Later appeared legions of learned men and critics, who compiled 'antiquities' and 'libraries,' and busied themselves also with the reading of texts, with chronology and geography, thus affording great assistance to historical studies. Such a fervour of philological studies was eventually attained that it was recognized as necessary to draw a clear distinction between the 'histories of antiquaries' (of which a considerable number survive either entire or in fragments)[Pg 186] and 'histories of historians,' and Polybius several times said that it is easy to compose history from books, because it suffices to take up one's residence in a city where there exist rich libraries, but that true history requires acquaintance with political and military affairs and direct knowledge of places and of people; and Lucian repeated that it is indispensable for the historian to have political sense, ?δ?δακτον φυσ?ω? δ?ρον, a gift of nature not to be learned (the maxims and practices praised as quite novel by M?ser and Niebuhr are therefore by no means new). The fact is that a more profound theoretical consciousness corresponded with a more vigorous historiography, so inseparable is the theory of history from history, advancing with it. It was also known that history should not be made a simple instrument of practice, of political intrigue, or of amusement, and that its function is above all to aim at truth: ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. In consequence of this, partisanship, even for one's own country, was condemned (although it was recognized chat solicitude and sympathy were permissible); and quidquid Gr?cia mendax audet in historia was blamed. It was known that history is not chronicle (annales), which is limited to external things, recording (in the words of Asellio, the ancient Roman historian) quod factum, quoque anno gestum sit, whereas history tries to understand quo Consilio, quaque ratione gesta sint. And it was also known that history cannot set herself the same task as poetry. We find Thucydides referring with disdain to histories written with the object of gaining the prize in oratorical competitions, and to those which indulge in fables to please the vulgar. Polybius too inveighed against those who seek to emphasize moving details, and depict women dishevelled and in tears, and dreadful[Pg 187] scenes, as though composing tragedies and as though it were their business to create the marvellous and pleasing and not impart truth and instruction. If it be a fact that rhetorical historiography (a worsening of the imaginative and poetic) abounded in antiquity and introduced its false gold even into some masterpieces, the general tendency of the better historians was to set themselves free of ornate rhetoricians and of cheap eloquence. But the ancient historians will never fail of lofty poetical power and elevation for this reason (not even the 'prosaic' Polybius, who sometimes paints most effective pictures), but will ever retain what is proper to lofty historical narrative. Cicero and Quintilian, Diogenes and Lucian, all recognize that history must adopt verba ferme poetarum, that it is proxima poetis et quodammodo carmen solutum, that scribitur ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, that ?χει τι ποιητικ?ν, and the like. What the best historians and theorists sought at that time was not the aridity and dryness of mathematical or physical treatment (such as we often hear desired in our day), but gravity, abstention from fabulous and pleasing tales, or if not from fabulous then from frivolous tales, in fact from competition with the rhetoricians and composers of histories that were romances or gross caricatures of such. Above all they desired that history should remain faithful to real life, since it is the instrument of life, and a form of knowledge useful to the statesman and to the lover of his country, and by no means docile to the capricious requirements of the unoccupied seeking amusement.

This theory of historiography, which may be found here and there in a good many special treatises and in general treatises on the art of speech, finds nowhere such complete and conscious expression as in the frequent[Pg 188] polemical interludes of Polybius in his Histories, where the polemic itself endows it with precision, concreteness, and savour. Polybius is the Aristotle of ancient historiography: an Aristotle who is both historical and theoretical, completing the Stagirite, who in the vast expanse of his work had taken but little interest in history properly so called. And since so great a part of the ancient narratives lives in our own, so there is not one of the propositions recorded that has not been included and has not been worthy of being included in our treatises. And if, for example, the maxim that history should be narrated by men of the world and not by the simply erudite or by philologists, that it is born of practice and assists in practice, has been often neglected, the blame falls on those who neglect it. A further blunder committed by such writers has been to forget completely the τι ποιητικ?ν and to pay court to an ideal of history something like an anatomical map or a treatise of mechanics.

But the defect that ancient historiography exposes to our gaze is of another sort. The ancients did not observe it as a defect, or only sometimes, in a vague and fugitive manner, without attaching weight to it, for otherwise they would have remedied it when it occurred. The modern spirit inquires how the sentiments and conceptions which are now our ideal patrimony, and the institutions in which they are realized, have been gradually formed. It wishes to understand the revolutionary passages from primitive and Oriental to Gr?co-Roman culture, how modern ethic was attained through ancient ethic, the modern through the ancient state, the vast industry and international commerce of the modern world through the ancient mode of economic production, the passage from the myths of the Aryans to our philosophies,[Pg 189] from Mycenean to French or Swedish or Italian art of the twentieth century. Hence there are special histories of culture, of philosophy, of poetry, of the sciences, of technique, of economy, of morality, of religions, and so on, which are preferred to histories of individuals or of states themselves, in so far as they are abstract individuals. They are illuminated and inspired throughout with the ideas of liberty, of civilization, of humanity, and of progress. All this is not to be found in ancient historiography, although it cannot be said to be altogether absent, for with what could the mind of man have ever been occupied, save by human ideals or 'values'? Nor should the error be made of considering 'epochs' as something compact and static, whereas they are various and in motion, or of rendering those divisions natural and external which, as has been demonstrated, are nothing but the movement of our thought as we think history, a fallacy linked with the other one concerning the absolute beginning of history and the rendering temporal of the forms of the spirit. Whoever is gifted with the patience of the collector will meet here and there with suggestions and buddings of those historiographical conceptions of which, generally speaking, we have denied the existence in the writings of the ancients. He who finds diversion in modernizing the old may travesty the thoughts of the ancients, as they have been travestied, so as to render them almost altogether similar to those of the moderns. In the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, for instance, is to be admired a sketch of the development of Greek philosophy, of the various naturalistic interpretations which have been in turn proposed for the explanation of the cosmos, and so on, up to the new orientation of the mind, when, "compelled by truth itself," it turned toward a different order of[Pg 190] principles—that is to say, till the time of Anaxagoras, "who seems to be a sober man among the intoxicated," thus continuing up to the time of Socrates, who founded ethic and discovered the universal and the definition. A sketch of the history of civilization is to be found at the beginning of the History of Thucydides, and Polybius will be found discoursing of the progress that had been made in all the arts, while Cicero, Quintilian, and several others trace the progress of rights and of literature. There are also touches of human value in conflict with one another in the narratives of the struggles between Greeks and barbarians, between the truly civil and active life of the former and the proud, lazy habits of the latter. Other similar conceptions of human values will be found in many comparisons of peoples, and above all in the way that Tacitus describes the Germans as a new moral power rising up against that of ancient Rome, and perhaps also in the repugnance which the same historian experiences at seeing before him the Jews, who follow rites contrarius ceteris mortalibus. Finally, Rome, mistress of the world, will sometimes assume in our eyes the aspect of a transparent symbol of the human ideal, analogous to Roman law, gradually idealized in the form of natural law. But here it is rather a question of symbols than of conceptions, of our own conclusions than of the thoughts proper to the ancients. When, for instance, we examine the history of philosophy of Aristotle as outlined by him, we find that it consists above all in a rapid critical account to serve as prop?deutic to his system; and literary and artistic histories and histories of civilization seem often to be weakened by the prejudice that these are not really necessary mental forms, but luxuries and refinements. At the utmost we can speak of exceptions, incidents, tentatives; which[Pg 191] does not in any way alter the comprehensive impression and general conclusion to the effect that the ancients never possessed explicit histories of civilization, philosophy, religions, literature, art, or rights: none, in fact, of the many possessed by ourselves. Nor did they possess 'biography' in the sense that we do, as the history of the ideal function of an individual in his own time and in the life of humanity, nor the sense of development, and when they speak of primitive times they rarely feel that they are primitive, but are rather disposed to transfigure them poetically, in the same way that Dante did by the mouth of Cacciaguida that Fiorenza which "stood soberly and modestly at peace" within the circle of the ancient days. It was one of the "severe labours" of our Vico to recover the crude reality of history beneath these poetic idylls. In this work he was assisted, not by the ancient historiographers, but by documents and mostly by languages.

The physiognomy of the histories of the ancients as described very accurately reflects the character of their philosophy, which never attained to the conception of the spirit, and therefore also failed to attain to that of humanity, liberty, and progress, which are aspects or synonyms of the former. It certainly passed from physiology or cosmology to ethic, logic, and rhetoric; but it schematized and materialized these spiritual disciplines because it treated them empirically. Thus their ethic did not rise above the custom of Greece and Rome, nor their logic above abstract forms of reasoning and discussing, nor their poetic above classes of literature. For this reason all assume the form of precepts. 'Anti-historical philosophy' has been universally recognized and described, but it is anti-historical because anti-spiritual, anti-historical because naturalistic.[Pg 192] The ancients also failed to notice the deficiency observed by us, for they were entirely occupied with the joy of the effort of passing from myth to science and thus to the collection and classification of the facts of reality. That is to say, they were engrossed upon the sole problem which they set themselves to solve, and solved so successfully that they supplied naturalism with the instruments which it still employs: formal logic, grammar, the doctrine of the virtues, the doctrine of literary classes, categories of civil rights, and so forth. These were all Gr?co-Roman creations.

But that ancient historians and philosophers were not explicitly aware of the above defect in its proper terms, or rather in our modern terms, does not mean that they were not to some extent exercised by it. In every historical period exist problems theoretically formulated and for that very reason solved, while others have not yet arrived at complete theoretical maturity, but are seen, intuited, though not yet adequately thought. If the former are the positive contribution of that time to the chain whose links form the human spirit, the latter represent an unsatisfied demand, which binds that time in another way to the coming time. The great attention paid to the negative aspect of every epoch sometimes leads to the forgetting of the other aspect, and to the consequent imagining of a humanity that passes not from satisfaction to satisfaction through dissatisfaction, but from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction and from error to error. But obscurities and discordances are possible in so far as light and concord have been previously attained. Thus they represent in their way progress, as is to be seen from the history that we are recounting, where we find them very numerous for the very reason that the age of mythologies and of[Pg 193] prodigies has been left behind. If Greece and Rome had not been both more than Greece and more than Rome, if they had not been the human spirit, which is infinitely greater than any Greece and any Rome—its transitory individuations—they would have been satisfied with the human portraits of their historians and would not have sought beyond. But they did seek beyond—that is to say, those very historians and philosophers sought; and since they had before them so many episodes and dramas of human life, reconstructed by their thought, they asked themselves what was the cause of those events, reasonably concluding that such a cause might be one fact or another, a particular fact; and for this reason they began to distinguish between facts and causes, and, in the order of causes themselves, between cause and occasion, as does Thucydides, or between beginning, cause, and occasion ?ρχ?, α?τ?α, πρ?φασι?, like Polybius. They thus became involved in disputes as to the true cause of this or that event, and ever since antiquity attempts have been made to solve the enigma of the 'greatness' of Rome, assuming in modern times the guise of a solemn experimentum of historical thought and thus forming the diversion of those historians who linger behind. The question was often generalized in the other question as to the motive power behind all history; and here too appear doctrines, afterward drawn out to great length, such as that the form of the political constitution was the cause of all the rest, and that other doctrine relating to climate and to the temperaments of peoples. The doctrine principally proposed and accepted was that of the natural law of the circle in human affairs, the perpetual alternation of good and evil, or the passage through political forms, which always returns to the[Pg 194] form from which it has taken its start, or as growth from infancy to manhood, declining into old age and decrepitude and ending in death. But a law of this sort, which satisfied and still satisfies the Oriental mind, did not satisfy the classical mind, which had a lively sense of human effort and of the stimulus received from obstacles encountered and conflicts endured. Hence therefore the further questions: Does fate or immutable necessity oppress man, or is he not rather the plaything of capricious fortune, or is he ruled by a wise and sagacious providence? It was also asked whether the gods are interested in human affairs or not. These questions met with answers that are sometimes pious, advocating submission to the divine will and wisdom, sometimes, again, inspired with the notion that the gods are not concerned with human affairs themselves, but solely with vengeance and punishment. All these conceptions lack firmness, and are for the most part confused, since a general uncertainty and confession of ignorance prevails in them: in incerto judicium est, said Tacitus, almost summing up the ancient argument on the subject in this epigram, or rather finding non-thought, failure to understand, to be the result of the argument.

What we do not understand we do not dominate; on the contrary, it dominates us, or at least menaces us, taking the form of evil; hence the psychological attitude of the ancients toward history must be described as pessimistic. They saw much greatness fall, but they never discovered the greatness that does not fall and that rises up greater after every fall. For this reason a flood of bitterness inundates their histories. Happiness, beauty of human life, always seemed to be something that had been and was no[Pg 195] longer, and were it present would have soon been lost. For the Romans and those professing the cult of Rome, it was primitive, austere, victorious Rome; and all the Roman historians, big and little, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, Paterculus and Florus, fix their gaze upon that image, as they lament the corruption of later days. Once it was Rome that trampled the world underfoot; but they knew that the triumphant queen must some day become slave from queen that once she was. This thought manifests itself in the most various forms, from the melancholy meditations of Scipio upon the ruins of Carthage to the fearful expectation of the lordship which—as Persia to Babylonia and Macedonia to Persia—must succeed to that of the Romans (the theory of the 'four monarchies' has its origin in the Gr?co-Roman world, whence it filtered into Palestine and into the Book of Daniel). Sometimes repressed, sometimes outspoken, we hear the anxious question: Who will be the successor and the gravedigger? Will it be the menacing Parthian? Will it be the Germans, so rich in new and mysterious energy?—all this, despite the proud consciousness of ancient times that had uttered the words "Rome, the eternal city." Certainly, that general pessimism is not altogether coherent, for no pessimism can be so altogether, and here and there appear fugitive hints of a perception of human progress in this or that part of life. We find, for instance, Tacitus, bitterest of men, remarking that nec omnia apud priores meliora, sed nostra quoque ?tas multa laudis et artium imitanda tulit, and one of the speakers in the De oratoribus observes that literary forms change with the times and that it is owing to the vitio malignitatis humana that we hear the perpetual praise of ancient things and the perpetual abuse of things modern.[Pg 196] Another interlocutor in the same dialogue draws attention to the dialectic connexion between the turbulence of life and the greatness of art, whence Rome donec erravit, donec se partibus et dissensionibus confecit, precisely at that time tulit valentiorem eloquentiam. This linking together of good and evil is not altogether absent in ancient philosophy, and is also to be found here and there in ancient historiography. Sallust, for example, is of opinion that Rome remained in good health so long as she had Carthage opposed to her and giving her trouble. Readers of Cicero and of Seneca will be aware that the idea of humanity also made considerable progress during the last days of the Republic and the first days of the Empire, owing to the influence of Stoicism. Divine providence too is courted, as was not formerly the case, and we also find Diodorus Siculus undertaking to treat the affairs of all nations as those of a single city (καθ?περ μι?? πολ?ω?). But these promises remain still weak, vague, and inert (the promissor Diodorus, for example, carried out none of his grandiose prologue), and in any case they foretell the dissolution of the classical world. During this epoch the problem as to the signification of history remains unsolved, because the contradictory conceptions above mentioned of fortune or of the gods, the belief in a universal worsening of things, in a fall or a regression, which had already been expressed in many ancient myths, were not by any means solutions.

Owing to their failure to realize spiritual value as the immanent progressive force in history, even the loftiest of the ancient historians were not able to maintain the unity and autonomy of historiographical work, which in other respects they had discovered and asserted. Although they had penetrated the deception exercised by those histories that are really poetry, or lies and[Pg 197] partisanship, or collections of material and unintelligent piling up of erudition, or instruments of pleasure, affording marvel for simple folk, yet they were on the other hand incapable of ever setting themselves free of the preconception of history as directed to an end of edification and chiefly of instruction. This real heteronomy then appeared to be autonomy. They are all agreed as to this: Thucydides proposed to narrate past events in order to predict from them future events, identical or similar, the perpetual return of human fortunes; Polybius sought out the causes of facts in order that he might apply them to analogous cases, and held those unexpected events to be of inferior importance whose irregularities place them outside rules; Tacitus, in conformity with his chief interest, which was rather moralistic than social or political, held his chief end to be the collection of facts notable for the vice or virtue which they contained, ne virtutes sileantur utque pravis dictis factìsque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit. Behind them came all the minor historians, all the hypocrites, who repeated by imitation or involuntary echo or false unction and in a superficial way what in the greater writers was the result of profound thought, as, for instance, the Sallusts, the Diogenes, the Diodori, the Plutarchs, and those that resemble them. Then there were all the extractors of historical quintessences, of memorable deeds and words of statesmen, captains, and philosophers, and even of women (the γυναικ?ν ?ρετα?). Ancient historiography has been called 'pragmatical,' and such it is, in the double sense of the word, ancient and modern: in so far as it limits itself to the earthly side of things and especially to the political (the 'pragmatic' of Polybius), and in so far as it adorns them with reflections and advice (the 'apodictic' of the same historian-theorist).

[Pg 198]

This heteronomous theory of history does not always remain merely theory, prologue, or frame, but sometimes operates so as to lead to the mingling of elements that are not historiographical with history, such as, for instance, is the case with the 'speeches' or 'orations' of historical personages, not delivered or not in agreement with what was really said, but invented or arranged by the historian and put into the mouths of the personages. This, in my opinion, has been wrongly looked upon as a survival of the 'epic spirit' in ancient historiography, or as a simple proof of the rhetorical ability of the narrators, because, if the first explanation hold as to some of the popular writers and the second as to certain rhetoricians, the origin of those falsifications was with the greater historians nothing but the fulfilment of the obligation of teaching and counselling accepted by them. But when such ends had been assigned to history, its intrinsic quality of truth and the line of demarcation which it drew between real and imaginary could not but vacillate to some extent, since the imaginary sometimes served excellently well and even better than the real for those ends. And setting aside Plato, who despised all knowledge save that of the transcendental ideas, did not Aristotle himself ask whether the greater truth belonged to history or to poetry? Had he not indeed said that history is 'less philosophical' than poetry? And if so why should not history have availed itself of the aid of poetry and of imagination? In any case, resistance could be opposed to this ulterior perversion by seeking the truth with vigilant eye, and also by reducing the share of the imaginary speeches and other parerga co the smallest dimensions. But it was impossible to dispense with belief in the end of instruction, because it was in any case necessary that history should have[Pg 199] some end, and a true end had not been discovered, and the end of instruction performed almost the function of a metaphor of the truth, since it was to some extent the nearest to the truth. In Polybius critical vigilance, scientific austerity, a keen desire for ample and severe history, attain to so high a level that one would feel disposed to treat the historian of Megalopolis like one of those great pagans that medieval imagination admitted to Paradise, or at least to Purgatory, as worthy of having known the true God by extraordinary means and as a reward for their intense moral conscience. But if we envisage the matter with greater calmness we shall have to consign Polybius also to the Limbo where those who "were before Christianity" and "did not duly adore God" are received. They were men of great value and reached the boundary, even touching it, but they never passed beyond.

[1] See pp. 112-116.