human portraits of their historians and would not have sought beyond. But they did seek beyond--that is to say, those very historians and philosophers sought; and since they had before them so many episodes and dramas of human life, reconstructed by their thought, they asked themselves what was the cause of those events, reasonably concluding that such a cause might be one fact or another, a particular fact; and for this reason they began to distinguish between facts and causes, and, in the order of causes themselves, between cause and occasion, as does Thucydides, or between beginning, cause, and occasion ἀρχή, αἰτία, πρόφασις, like Polybius. They thus became involved in disputes as to the true cause of this or that event, and ever since antiquity attempts have been made to solve the enigma of the 'greatness' of Rome, assuming in modern times the guise of a solemn experimentum of historical thought and thus forming the diversion of those historians who linger behind. The question was often generalized in the other question as to the motive power behind all history; and here too appear doctrines, afterward drawn out to great length, such as that the form of the political constitution was the cause of all the rest, and that other doctrine relating to climate and to the temperaments of peoples. The doctrine principally proposed and accepted was that of the natural law of the circle in human affairs, the perpetual alternation of good and evil, or the passage through political forms, which always returns to the form from which it has taken its start, or as growth from infancy to manhood, declining into old age and decrepitude and ending in death. But a law of this sort, which satisfied and still satisfies the Oriental mind, did not satisfy the classical mind, which had a lively sense of human effort and of the stimulus received from obstacles encountered and conflicts endured. Hence therefore the further questions: Does fate or immutable necessity oppress man, or is he not rather the plaything of capricious fortune, or is he ruled by a wise and sagacious providence? It was also asked whether the gods are interested in human affairs or not. These questions met with answers that are sometimes pious, advocating submission to the divine will and wisdom, sometimes, again, inspired with the notion that the gods are not concerned with human affairs themselves, but solely with vengeance and punishment. All these conceptions lack firmness, and are for the most part confused, since a general uncertainty and confession of ignorance prevails in them: _in incerto judicium est,_ said Tacitus, almost summing up the ancient argument on the subject in this epigram, or rather finding non-thought, failure to understand, to be the result of the argument.