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Updated: May 21, 2025
In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and proceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus.
This may be called a barbarous custom, and a nation of artistic feelings would certainly not have tolerated the continuance of this odd resurrection of the dead down to an epoch of fully-developed civilization; but even Greeks who were very dispassionate and but little disposed to reverence, such as Polybius, were greatly impressed by the naive pomp of this funeral ceremony.
Polybius, the historian, Panaetius, the philosopher, Terence and Lucilius, the poets, and the orator and politician Laelius were his friends. From his position, his talents, and his associations, he seemed marked out as the one man who could and would desire to step forth as the saviour of his country. But such self-sacrifice is not exhibited by men of Scipio's type.
Scipio would have preserved the city, but the Senate was inexorable. With the historian Polybius at his side, the Roman commander, as he looked down on the horrors of the conflagration, sorrowfully repeated the lines of Homer, "The day shall come when sacred Troy shall be leveled with the plain, And Priam and the people of that good warrior slain."
From Polybius the Romans, the best of them at least, first learnt to realise their own empire and the great change it had wrought in the world; to think about what they had done and the qualities that enabled them to do it.
Polybius places the passage of the Gauls across the Alps about ten or twenty years before the taking of Rome; and Diodorus describes them as advancing toward Rome by an uninterrupted march.
Among the ancients the work of the historians whom we consider trustworthy such writers, for instance, as Cæsar, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Tacitus may be said to fall generally within Rawlinson's canons 1 and 2 of historical criticism that is, cases where the historian has personal knowledge concerning the facts whereof he writes, or where the facts are such that he may reasonably be supposed to have obtained them from contemporary witnesses.
Polybius, who visited that quarter not long after the close of the present period, commends its numerous, handsome, and vigorous population: with a just legislation as to corn it would doubtless have been possible to make the basin of the Po, and not Sicily the granary of the capital.
Could Diodoros have escaped in time to reach the harbor with Polybius and Praxilla? How had Argutis contrived that her letter should reach Caesar's hands without too greatly imperiling himself? She was quite unconscious of any guilt toward Caracalla.
In some way or other, the man is tracked in the little footsteps of the child. Dryden marks the three steps of progress: "What the child admired, The youth endeavoured, and the man ACQUIRED." 'Dryden was an example of his own theory. He read Polybius, with a notion of his historic exactness, before he was ten years old. Witnesses rise over the whole field of learning.
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