Note 79 — POLYBIUS

Polybius, who, as will be noted, belongs to a period two and a half centuries later than the greatest Greek historians—Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon—is classed by Mahaffy as "the soberest and most valuable" of those who wrote with masters as their models. While he has suffered from the fate of all imitators, his work is "of the highest value to the historian, as a long series of approving critics has amply shown." He has never been read as a stylist, "nor could he be said to form a part of the classical literature of Greece."