The whole point is interesting as showing how far in
advance of his age Polybius may be said to have been.
The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his
writings what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal
writer of history; and no small light will be thrown on the
progress of historical criticism if we strive to collect and
analyse what in Polybius are more or less scattered expressions.
The ideal historian must be contemporary with the events he
describes, or removed from them by one generation only. Where it
is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where
that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and stories
carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in place
of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the
experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a
university town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a
man not merely of thought but of action, one who can do great
things as well as write of them, who in the sphere of history could
be what Byron and AEschylus were in the sphere of poetry, at once
LE CHANTRE ET LE HEROS.
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