Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/242

218 find it at that point. There was living then in Rome a Greek of ability, who had ample means of observing the working of the Roman constitution, and whose record of it has most fortunately come down to us. Polybius' account is not, indeed, to be accepted without reserve; it was coloured by his unbounded admiration for Rome and her great deeds, as well as by the peculiar philosophical bent of his own mind, which was apt to deal with political institutions in the abstract, without taking sufficient account of the social and economical forces which are continually acting upon them. But we are not without the means of criticising and verifying Polybius. Livy's history, based, in these last books which have survived from his vast undertaking, on records for the most part of undoubted value, brings us down to within a few years of 150 B.C. Looking on, too, we have materials for a consistent view of the constitution from the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C., in Appian's Civil Wars, in Plutarch's Lives of the Gracchi, and in many other writers of whom Cicero is the most copious. Livy gives us a picture of a constitution in the highest state of efficiency, performing its work admirably, and almost without a hitch; Appian and the later writers show us this same constitution rapidly getting out of gear, and sustaining formidable attacks with difficulty; and between the two we have Polybius, studying it calmly as a foreigner, admiring its perfect balance