SOURCE: "Polybius and His Times," in The Quarterly Review, Vol. 148, No. 295, July, 1879, pp. 186-222.

In the following excerpt from an originally unsigned article on the Roman Republic, Strachan-Davidson briefly reviews Polybius's life and work, praising his "strict integrity" and " sound practical intelligence."

In the centuries when the knowledge of the classical writings slumbered, the tradition of ancient politics was summed up in the memory of the Roman Cæsar. The idea of law and order concentrated in the person of a universal monarch, and sanctified by the name of Rome, had impressed itself deeply on the imagination of the world; and this idea meets us throughout the middle ages, crossing the turbulent freedom of barbaric tribes and the license of petty local rulers, and surviving amidst all the changing forms which conquest and migration gave to the actual structure of medieval society. Cæsarism and its works alone...