Polybius has received very great praise for his insistence upon accuracy. Professor Shotwell[7] ends an enthusiastic chapter with the sentence: “But as long as history endures the ideals of Polybius will be an inspiration and guide.” The praise is deserved, especially when we remember that Polybius had behind him in Greece nearly two centuries of extravagant rhetorical history. But when we ask how it happened that he turned his back upon all that tradition, no explanations are offered. It is not an adequate interpretation to say that by living in banishment he was removed from the temptations of historians writing the story of their own people, for he usually succeeds in being quite objective even when he writes of the Achaean League. Is it not likely that his contact with matter-of-fact and legal-minded Roman senators induced him to adopt some of their manners and methods? His respect for the integrity, sanity, and uprightness of Roman senators of the Scipionic period he voices repeatedly[8] in contrasting their qualities with the unreliability, astuteness, and fickleness of his countrymen. It is also to be remembered that the first part of his history is based upon Fabius, who therefore was his first preceptor in historical writing. It would seem at least worth considering whether Polybius did not owe some of his qualities as an historian to the fact that he served his apprenticeship in history among the early Roman annalists and that he adapted his work to the public which had been brought up on those matter-of-fact books. At any rate he is well-nigh unique among the Greeks who wrote history after the classical period. There is of course nothing to indicate that Fabius and his immediate followers were in any sense great historians. Without any literary background, with only such practice in writing as would come from composing state documents, occupied every day with the concerns of a rapidly expanding state, they recorded only public acts and public discussions. What men did and strove for, outside of the voting, legislating, and fighting groups, was not recorded. Not even within their chosen field does there appear a penetrative analysis of senatorial policy. Fabius, to be sure, enumerated the immediate causes of both of the Punic wars but only with a jurist’s interest in deciding at what point the enemy had committed the breach for which he deserved punishment. As historians these men had the limitations of their qualities and of their occupations. But on the other hand there is no evidence that they knowingly garbled facts.