Polybius

I wrote a piece in some collected volume not long ago saying that if you look at the classical studies movement in America, there's some really great things about it, but they tend to overvalue philosophy as the, you know, they're like, if we're going to have the classics, we're going to study Plato.

Eh, you know, Thucydides, Polybius.

For one thing, they had actually more, Polybius probably had more real impact on the way people were thinking about politics and constitutionalism than many of the philosophers, but also that the way that the ancient Greeks develop a way of writing about history, of organizing information into narratives, of processes of verification, of things that no historian would do today, but which were actually quite important, of having characters give speeches based on what someone with that character would say in a given set of circumstances as a way of interpreting rather than reproducing events.

These were tremendous intellectual achievements, in a sense comparable to, say, what the discovery of perspective does in the arts.

And we have not really, I think, the historical culture... hasn't sort of taken as good a look at this as an intellectual achievement of the human mind as the foundation of the way we think and interpret events still today.

Quoting their own, he said, Cretans are liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons.

The Roman historian Apian wrote how Crete had a long history of violence and Cretans often assisted pirates attacking the ships in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Greek historian Polybius Wrote how Cretans would acquire wealth by any means that they can't be trusted, and the churches there are filled with false teaching, so the Holy Spirit's plan to preserve the church on the island of Crete, about 160 mile island, is to send Titus.

Hey, you're gonna go there, and here's the step-by-step of what you're going to do.

So we're wrapping up this book.

Polybius wrote about how Titus was the leader of this Christian movement on this island, and the island became known.

After being known for violence and thievery and lies, it became known for Christianity.

Another Roman historian wrote something similar, whose name I can't remember right now.

For example, the fable of Menenius Agrippa, in the same way he gives us descriptions of battles as if he had been an actual spectator, but whose features would serve well enough for battles in any period, and whose distinctness contrasts, on the other hand, with the want of connection and the inconsistency that prevail elsewhere, even in his treatment of chief points of interest.

The difference between such a compiler and an original historian may be best seen by comparing Polybius himself with the style in which Livy uses, expands, and abridges his annals in those period, of which Polybius's account has been preserved.

Johann von Müller has given a stiff, formal, pedantic aspect of history in the endeavor to remain faithful in his portraiture to the times he describes.

We much prefer the narratives we find in old Trudy.

Hamilton fears above all democracy.

He's read Polybius, which says that all Pure governments degenerate into their opposite, monarchy into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into the mob.

And among the last letters that he writes before the fatal duel are, I feel like this world is passing me by.

If we have a great enemy, it is democracy in capital letters.

For example, the fable of Menenius Agrippa, in the same way he gives us descriptions of battles as if he had been an actual spectator, but whose features would serve well enough for battles in any period, and whose distinctness contrasts, on the other hand, with the want of connection and the inconsistency that prevail elsewhere, even in his treatment of chief points of interest.

The difference between such a compiler and an original historian may be best seen by comparing Polybius himself with the style in which Livy uses, expands, and abridges his annals in those period, of which Polybius's account has been preserved.

Johann von Müller has given a stiff, formal, pedantic aspect of history in the endeavor to remain faithful in his portraiture to the times he describes.

We much prefer the narratives we find in old Chudi.