in every other state, and must have been in Rome) the gradual result of contingencies and progressive improvements, of assertions of rights, and struggles for power. The opinion entertained by Polybius of the uncertainty of the Roman history, is sufficiently manifest from a passage in the fourth book of his admirable work, which is written with all the philosophy and profound inquiry of Tacitus, without any of his apparent affectation.—“The things which I have undertaken to describe,” says he, “are those which I myself have seen, or such as I have received from men who were eye-witnesses of them. For, had I gone back to a more early period, and borrowed my accounts from the report of persons who themselves had only heard them before from others, as it would scarcely have been possible that I should myself be able to discern the true state of the matters that were then transacted, so neither could I have written anything concerning them with confidence.” What, indeed, can we expect to know with regard to the Kings of Rome, when we find so much uncertainty with regard to the most memorable events of the republic, as the period of the first creation of a dictator and tribunes of the people? The same doubt exists in the biography of illustrious characters. Cicero says, that Coriolanus, having gone over to the Volsci, repressed the struggles of his resentment by a voluntary death; “for, though you, my Atticus,” he continues, “have represented his death in a different manner, you must pardon me if I do not subscribe to the justness of your representations(134).” Atticus, I presume, gave the account as we now have it, that he was killed in a tumult of the Volsci, and Fabius Pictor had written that he lived till old age(135). Of the reliance to be placed on the events between the death of Coriolanus and the termination of the second Punic war, we may judge from the uncertainty which prevailed with regard to Scipio Africanus, a hero, of all others, the most distinguished, and who flourished, comparatively, at a recent period. Yet some of the most important events of his life are involved in contradiction and almost hopeless obscurity.—“Cicero,” says Berwick, in his Memoirs of Scipio, “speaks with great confidence of the year in which he died, yet Livy found so great a difference of opinion among historians on the subject, that he declares himself unable to ascertain it. From a fragment in Polybius, we learn, that, in his time, the authors who had written of Scipio were ignorant of some circumstances of his life, and mistaken in others; and, from Livy, it appears, that the accounts respecting his life, trial, death, funeral, and sepulchre, were so contradictory, that he was not able to determine what tradition, or whose writings, he ought to credit.”