His office thus was to gather up
what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider
application.
Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the
Philosophy of history appears next, as in Plutarch's tract on 'Why
God's anger is delayed,' the pendulum of thought had swung back to
where it began. His theory was introduced to the Romans under the
cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the
philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in
Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the
stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier
to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius
had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the
rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy
fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household
over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of
the people, died wearing the purple of a king.
No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the
means by which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history.
The principle of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well
as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal
ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu
and Tocqueville.
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