a Roman prisoner, esteemed and occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture.  Thus Polybius became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts, regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit.  In this spirit he acted as a practical statesman, and wrote his history.  If in his youth he had done homage to the honourable but impracticable local patriotism of the Achaeans, during his later years, with a clear discernment of inevitable necessity, he advocated in the community to which he belonged the policy of the closest adherence to Rome.  It was a policy in the highest degree judicious and beyond doubt well-intentioned, but it was far from being high-spirited or proud.  Nor was Polybius able wholly to disengage himself from the vanity and paltriness of the Hellenic statesmanship of the time.  He was hardly released from exile, when he proposed to the senate that it should formally secure to the released their former rank in their several homes; whereupon Cato aptly remarked, that this looked to him as if Ulysses were to return to the cave of Polyphemus to request from the giant his hat and girdle.  He often made use of his relations with the great men in Rome to benefit his countrymen; but the way in which he submitted to, and boasted of, the illustrious protection somewhat approaches fawning servility.  His literary activity breathes throughout the same spirit as his practical action.  It was the task of his life to write the history of the union of the Mediterranean states under the hegemony of Rome.  From the first Punic war down to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth his work embraces the fortunes of all the civilized states—­namely Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and Italy—­and exhibits in causal connection the mode in which they came under the Roman protectorate; in so far he describes it as his object to demonstrate the fitness and reasonableness of the Roman hegemony.  In design as in execution, this history stands in clear and distinct contrast with the contemporary Roman as well as with the contemporary Greek historiography.  In Rome history still remained wholly at the stage of chronicle; there existed doubtless important historical materials, but what was called historical composition was restricted—­with the exception of the very respectable but purely individual writings of Cato, which at any rate did not reach beyond the rudiments of research and narration—­partly to nursery tales, partly to collections of notices.  The Greeks had certainly exhibited historical research and had written history; but the conceptions of nation and state had been so completely lost amidst the distracted times of the Diadochi, that none of the numerous historians succeeded in following the steps of the great Attic masters in spirit and in truth, or in treating from a general point of view the matter of world-wide interest in the history of the times.