Yet the day was coming when Rome was to rule in the East as well as in the West; she was step by step to draw all the Greek powers, those that were Greek by adoption as well as those that we may call Greek by birth, within the spell of that influence which silently changed from alliance to subjection. The details of that process, the picture of the world into which Rome burst as it were in a moment, the history in short of the third and second centuries, have, in the common course of so-called classical studies, met with a neglect which can be measured only by their paramount importance in universal history. The distinctive aspect of that age I shall have to speak of again. I wish now to point out how rich in political instruction of every kind, rich perhaps beyond every other age of so-called classical times, the age of Polybios really is. The Greek world of his day was made up of an assemblage of states, of every degree of power and of every form of political constitution. There was nothing like it in the earlier days of Greece; there was nothing like it in the after days when Rome practically became the world. But the Greek world of those days gives us a lively image of the political state of modern Europe for some ages past. The political experience of Polybios was immeasureably wider than that of Thucydides; he had in truth an experience fully as wide and varied as that of any modern statesman. Thucydides knew only the independent city, oligarchic or democratic, and the city which would fain be independent but was not. In his day kingship and federation--federation worthy to be so called--were still in the background; they hardly stood forth on the political stage; kingship was not the constitution of any acknowledged Greek power; federation was not the constitution of any Greek power of the first or even of the second rank. But Polybios could study, within the range of Greek or Greek-speaking powers, every form of kingship and every form of commonwealth. There was the national kingship of Macedonia, the king ruling over his own people. There was the local kingship of Egypt, the rule of Greek kings over a foreign nation. There was the Seleukid dominion, fallen indeed from its old greatness, but whose kings still kept up some memory of the position alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, the position of the Great King, the King of Kings, ruling over lands and cities, Greek and barbarian, of every speech, of every form of life, of every kind of relation to the central power. And the Greek city-commonwealth, fully free and independent, was still a familiar form of political life; nor need it shock us that the purest and noblest example of a Greek democracy was now to be found, not at Athens but at Rhodes. But the highest political life of Greece, above all of old European Greece, was now to be found in the federal states, in Polybios’ own Achaia, in gallant and faithful Akarnania, in the adopted Greek