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

VI

POLYB1US

207

the union of the three principles of monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy, compounded in such
a way that they balanced one another and mutually
counteracted the separate tendencies of each to
degenerate. The Spartans owed the idea of their
mixed constitution to the happy divination of the
genius Lycurgus, the Romans attained to theirs
through the school of experience. In other words,
the Spartan constitution was an invention, the
Roman was a growth. From these premisses,
which are largely untrue, Polybius deduced the
exceptional permanence of the institutions of
Sparta and Rome, and evidently thought that
they defied the law of degeneration. It may be
noticed that the superiority of a mixed constitution
was not a new idea.
In other passages, however, Polybius speaks in
a different tone. He sacrifices the theory that
Rome owed everything to her mixed constitution,
by admitting that her government was aristocratic
when she reached her greatness in the time of
the Second Punic war. It was a mechanical and
wholly inadequate theory, even if the facts on
which it was based had been correct —even if
Rome had possessed a constitution in which the
equilibrium of the three constitutional principles
was maintained. In abandoning it Polybius was
forced to recognise that the secret of life did not
lie in a mechanical adjustment of the parts of the
state, and to admit that there was no guarantee
that Rome herself would not decline. But what