The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

VI

POSEIDONIUS

221

-from Tiberius Gracchus to the dictatorship of
Sulla-would have been far clearer than it is. The
task of continuing Polybius was, however, undertaken by a remarkable man of exceptional talent,
Poseidonius of Apamea (c. 235-151 B.C.), whose
wide influence as a thinker is becoming more and
more recognised-recognised even to exaggeration.
He was a pupil of the Stoic Panaetius; he taught
in Rhodes, where Cicero heard his lectures; he was
a friend of Pompey, and well known to cultivated
circles in Rome. He travelled in western Europe,
and embodied his geographical researches in a book
On the Ocean, which was much used by Strabo.
Besides being a philosopher and a geographer, he
was a mathematician, an astronomer (he wrote a
book on the size of the sun), a student of natural
science, a meteorologist. He made an important
contribution to the study of tides in relation to the
phases of the moon. He had the encyclopaedic
interest and the encyclopaedic faculty of an
Aristotle or a Leibniz. History was only one,
and not the chief, of his many pursuits. His
historical work (in fifty-two or perhaps sixty-two
Books), beginning with 144 B.C. where Polybius
ended, appears to have come down to 82 B.C. We
have only a few fragments of it, but it is the source
of our knowledge of those times-the source from
which Livy, Diodorus, Appian, Plutarch, and
Josephus drew. The leanings of Poseidonius were
somewhat oligarchical, and he was partial to his
friend Pompey. Like Polybius he was a traveller,