Coming down the centuries we find no great name until we reach the period when Rome, having firmly established her power in Italy, began to look out beyond the bounds of the peninsula and dream of foreign conquests. This great culminating epoch of Roman history found a great transcriber in Polybius. His work was avowedly written to describe and explain the events by which Rome “in the short period of fifty-three years,” conquered the world. Polybius was himself a Greek, born in Megalopolis. He was a practical statesman, and the personal friend of Aratus, the leader of the Achæan League. We have noted in a previous volume that Polybius was one of the thousand Greeks sent as hostages to Rome. He spent the greater part of the remainder of his life in Italy; became the personal friend of Scipio the Younger, and was present with that leader when Carthage was finally destroyed. Belonging thus to the later epoch of Grecian history, when the spirit of the age was philosophical rather than artistic, Polybius wrote such a work as might be expected of a man of genius of his time. His point of view is utterly different from that of his great predecessor Herodotus, though not altogether dissimilar to that of Thucydides. He himself tells us over and over--in fact he never tires of repeating--that his intention is to instruct rather than to entertain; to teach the causes of Rome’s success; to point the moral of her victories. Being a man of affairs, he not unnaturally holds that only men of affairs are competent to become reliable historians. He points out that there are two ways of gaining knowledge: “one derived from reading books, and the other from interrogating men;” he inveighs with some asperity against those historians, taking Timæus as a type, who confine themselves to the former method. “The knowledge that is acquired by reading,” he says, “is gained without any danger or any kind of toil. If a man will only fix his residence in the neighbourhood of a library, or in a city that abounds with written memoirs, he may make his researches with perfect ease; and, reposing himself with full tranquillity, may compare the accounts and detect the errors of former writers. But the knowledge which is drawn from personal examination and inquiry, is attended with great fatigue and great expense. It is this, however, which is the most important, and which gives indeed the chief value to history. Historians themselves are ready to acknowledge this truth. For Ephorus says, that if it were possible for the writers of history to be present at all transactions, such knowledge would be preferable to any other. To the same purpose is that passage of Theopompus: that the experience which is gained in battles renders a man a consummate general; that practice in pleading causes forms the perfect orator; and that the same observation is just with respect to the arts of navigation and of medicine.