ideas of the utmost importance for the understanding of the history. They hold a place in the work of Thucydides not unlike that of the songs of the chorus in a tragedy of schylus or Sophocles. They gradually disclose the latent significance of the history, and the views and motives of the various parties engaged in it. They save the author from the necessity and risks of theorising in his own name on the course of events, while yet most effectively and artistically setting forth the conclusions at which he had arrived. At the same time they are not unjust to those to whom they are assigned, but such as might most appropriately have been spoken by them. Thucydides was the first scientific historian. But he was also a great historical artist. His judicial impartiality and calm passionless objectivity of judgment sprang not from insensibility but from conscientiousness and self-restraint. In reading his pages we perceive that he felt as strongly as he conceived clearly. The tone of austere melancholy which pervades his work corresponds perfectly to the tragic nature of the story which is its subject; and we are made to realise all the misery and pathos of that story. His style has nothing of the ease, flow, and sweetness of that of Herodotus; but it is of rare strength and conciseness, moves on rapidly and directly without a useless word or phrase, varies as the occasion requires, and rises at times to the loftiest heights. "It has," to use the words of Professor Jebb, "many faults. It is often involved, abrupt, obscure. But no writer has grander bursts of rugged eloquence, or more of that greatness which is given by sustained intensity of noble thought and feeling."

Thucydides left his history unfinished, and Xenophon attempted to complete it. But his continuation, the 'Hellenica,' is altogether deficient in the great qualities which characterise the work of Thucydides. It is dry, ill arranged, superficial, prejudiced, and even feeble and unattractive in style. The fame of Xenophon as an historian must rest on his 'Anabasis,' and there it may rest securely. No military incident has ever been told with more exquisite simplicity and fascinating art than the Retreat of the Ten Thousand.

It was natural that it should be a Greek who first tried to realise the idea of a universal history. Nevertheless, it could

not be even the most comprehensive-minded Greek of the age of Herodotus or Thucydides when there was no visible unity of any kind in the world, but one who had the spectacle of Rome before his eyes, and who had studied her steady march towards universal empire, as far at least as the period when "the affairs of Italy and Africa conjoined with those of Asia and Greece, and all moved together towards one fixed and single point." Polybius, who spent a portion of his life at Rome, who studied her history closely, and saw clearly that her success was no accident, but the natural results of general causes-her unity, institutions, and character who beheld her triumph over Carthage and Macedonia, and was fully conscious that his own divided and demoralised land could offer her no resistancewas a Greek so placed, and he was the first to attempt a universal history. He did so with the distinctest perception of its advantages over particular histories, which he tells us "can no more convey a perfect view and knowledge of the whole than a survey of the divided members of a body once endued with life and beauty can yield a just conception of all the comeliness and vigour which it has received from nature." A chief object with him, therefore, was to show by what stages and in what ways each nation had reached its last estate. He assumed that the real had been the rational, and that Rome had become the mistress of the world for the world's good. Being the power best fitted to rule over the nations, Rome had obtained that rule. She was "the noblest and most beneficent work of Fortune," but of a Fortune neither blind nor unjust. Polybius was not a servile flatterer of Rome, but his whole view of history necessarily rendered him an apologist of accomplished facts, and of Roman success. He was like Thucydides in that he endeavoured to exhibit the causes of events; but unlike him in that he was not content to do this in a purely historical manner, but reasoned on them in his own name, and introduced into the history his personal impressions and reflections. For Polybius, as for Thucydides, the motive forces of human nature were the great factors of history. He disbelieved divine interventions in history, and regarded the popular religion as only a superstition useful to awe and frighten the multitude. Thucydides wrote in order that by giving an ac

curate knowledge of the past he might supply his readers with a clue to that future which, in all human probability, will repeat or resemble the past. Polybius himself drew from the facts he narrated such lessons as he deemed would be of service to politicians. As his work thus combined practical political teaching with an exhibition of events as causes and effects, and so was a course of political instruction conveyed and exemplified through a record of actions, he called it a paypaтeía; and he is often described as the originator of pragmatic historiography. By his reflections on the causes of the growth of the power of Rome, he opened up a path afterwards followed by Machiavelli, Bossuet, and Montesquieu. He was perfectly aware of the necessity of attending especially to general causes, and was probably the first to make a serious study of the spirit and history of the Roman constitution. That he fell into errors on the subject was inevitable. It may, however, be doubted if any later writer of the ancient world treated it with deeper insight, or with more accurate knowledge.

The idea of a universal history was, as we have seen, the reflection and result of the universal empire of Rome, which made the known world externally one, a single great political whole. Rome made the world Roman and became herself cosmopolitan. The indebtedness of history to Rome as exemplifying that unity of a universal government, without which there could never have arisen any notion of a universal history, is incalculable. The world came to know external unity only in and through Rome. The universal empire of pagan Rome was the condition and foundation of the universal empire of Catholic Rome, and of such unity as Christendom has retained since the unity of Catholicism was broken. After the Macedonian wars no extraordinary genius was required to discern in the history of the world a unity centring in Rome. How Polybius saw and was impressed by it has already been indicated. Among Latin writers Cornelius Nepos was the first to compose a universal history-omne avum explicare. His work is lost, like several later works of the same kind. None of the general histories written during the empire were productions of much merit. No Latin author showed himself able even intelligently to continue what Polybius had begun. The Roman will made

history universal, but the Roman intellect was deficient in the qualities requisite for treating successfully of universal history. It was not in this department that Roman writers acquired fame as historians.

The pride of the early Romans led them both to falsify their own history and to take some measures to preserve the memory of it. Their registers, their fasti and annals, were only meagre and unsatisfactory materials for history. As an art history was late in appearing at Rome. The rude Roman speech was fashioned with difficulty into a literary instrument. A Roman literature was only developed under Greek influences. The conquest of Greece by the arms of Rome was followed by the conquest of Rome by the mind of Greece; and in Roman literature Grecian and Latin qualities were inseparably blended. The first Latin work entitled to be called a history would seem to have been the Origines' of Cato. For a considerable time Roman historiography was uncritical and inartistic; and it was from the first affected by a vice which inhered in it to the end —namely, a tendency to subordinate truth to what was supposed to be for the interest of the State, or for the edification of the individual.

Cæsar and Sallust were the first Roman writers who produced works displaying historical genius. The Commentaries of Cæsar on the Gallic and Civil Wars are not only invaluable for the information which they contain, but are composed in a style perfect in its kind and in its relation to the subject. They are an admirable reflection of their author's mind,-one absolutely clear in conception and observation, completely master of itself and of whatever it undertook to deal with, and which moved towards the end it aimed at in the most direct, rapid, and decisive manner. But they are simply military narratives, and cannot entitle Cæsar to a place in the highest rank of historians. Of historical philosophy of any kind, or general historical ideas, they show no trace. Cæsar was far too clear-sighted to state what was false, but no one probably knew better how to make silence serve his purpose, or so to present his facts as to make them suggest what it would hardly have become him to have said. Handling speech with the most masterly ease and naturalness as a practically use

ful instrument, he wisely dispensed with literary adornment and elaboration.

Hence Sallust may justly be described as the first artistic historian or historical artist of Rome. His Catalinarian Conspiracy and Jugurthine War are small but choice and carefully finished pieces, in which their author's talents alike as historian and littérateur are seen to full advantage. In the selection, disposition, and general treatment of his subjects, as also in his style, he took the work of Thucydides for his model. As regards the highest historical qualities, he must be admitted to have fallen much beneath his great exemplar. Yet few who have imitated Thucydides have so nearly equalled him in so many respects, while surpassing him in some. He had neither

the originality nor the greatness of Thucydides, neither his conscientiousness and thoroughness as an historical investigator, nor his grasp and penetration as an historical thinker. But he had remarkable skill in combining and disposing facts into pictures, in drawing characters by a few striking traits, and in juxtaposing and contrasting his personages. His moral reflections may be irrelevant, but his talent for moral portraiture was indubitable. He had a power of psychological, and consequently of moral, analysis, almost equal to that of Tacitus, although exercised on a much smaller scale. His works are from their own merits worthy of their reputation; and their relation to those of Thucydides on the one side, and to those of Tacitus on the other, give them a special interest for a student of the development of historiography.

But it was neither in the sphere of universal nor of episodical history that the Latin historians performed their most distinctive work. It was in that of national history. The men who founded Rome's greatness, who won for her by endurance and daring the empire of the world, were not men of broad but of narrow ideas, not of liberal but of exclusive feelings, men animated by a proud, absorbing, ruthless patriotism. It was through the strength of their national feeling that the Romans gained the universal empire in which they lost it; and, as a general rule, when the classical scholar thinks of Roman history it is not as leading to even an imperfect recognition of human brotherhood-to a sense of something generic in man, of a