"And as long as any survive who have had experience of oligarchical supremacy and domination, they regard their present constitution as a blessing, and hold equality and freedom as of the utmost value. But as soon as a new generation has arisen, and the democracy has descended to their children's children, long association weakens their value for equality and freedom, and some seek to become more powerful than the ordinary citizens; and the most liable to this temptation are the rich. So when they begin to be fond of office, and find themselves unable to obtain it by their own unassisted efforts and their own merits, they ruin their estates, while enticing and corrupting the common people in every possible way. By which means when, in their senseless mania for reputation, they have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot."
--Polybius, The Histories, 146 BC

The perils of JDate aside, the perils of not reading Polybius is more severe . . . his quote is a good example.

Excellent quote from an excellent dude. I can't improve upon the quote or interpret it any better than anyone else, so I'll just give some props to Polybius, one of the first historians. (Thucydides is considered one of the first, as is Herodotus, Xenophon, and Tacitus. But Herodotus is to have been more reliant on mythology, rumor, and any source to suit his nationalistic tales, while Thucydides and Xenophon are considered to be more political philosophers than historians in the end.) Which leaves Polybius (he's really the first historian methinks...), a Greek national, contemporary, and participant in many of the events he writes of a fine candidate for the prize of one of the best of the early Historians; especially because he writes of a burgeoning Empire (Rome) nation (Italy) about to supplant all others in the Mediterranean (namely Greece), where he pridefully hailed from, so he held objectivity as an important standard.

Today, for all the talk among Conservative naysayers, and other pessimists about America being a modern-day-Roman-republic-in-tailspin on-the-verge-of-Empire, one must find the sources of the fall of the republic / rise of the empire to draw any similarities, but more importantly we must find the sources of the RISE of the REPUBLIC; and that's found in Polybius better than anywhere else (see also Plutarch and Suetonius).

Polybius is responsible for the greatest accounts of the Three Punic Wars (which brought us ROME as we knew it), the second punic war brought us Hannibal, perhaps the greatest general of all time. History knows him as the guy who lead the elephants from Spain into and over the Pyrenees and Alps Mountain range, and into Northern Italy. But, as brilliant as the military feats of Hannibal, more brilliant is Polybius's fine detail of lesser campaigns and initiatives by Hannibal and other principals of the time period which "The Histories" covers. As it relates to Hannibal, his most interesting account is of the Battle of Lake Trasimene.

Perhaps most accessible about Polybius is that he is somewhat comparable, in a sense in his relationship to the politician Scipio Aemilianus, to that of a modern day aide-de-camp much the same way a Mark Hanna gets tied to President McKinley and a Karl Rove is tied to President G.W. Bush. . . .

But to paraphrase Lincoln, we can't possibly know where we are going if we don't know where we've been. In The Histories, Polybius tells us as much about the present as he does about the past.

In any event, and in the spirit of modern day comparisons, "Polybius is to Historians as Dinosaur Jr. is to Grunge Rock (and pop rock)" in the sense that others have gained glory, while he laid down a model of inquiry and standard of narrative for others to steal from, Polybius did not attain any of the glory. (Be a real friend of Polybius and pick up "Green Mind" by Dinosaur Jr. and "The Histories" by Polybius off of FlynnFiles' link to Amazon).

Polybius doesn't get a lot of play in the newspapers these days, and I don't think he's ever been on Meet The Press, but he's got more to say and is more relevant to today's world than let's say, Doris Kearns Goodwin or that scrotum-faced Jon Meacham from Newsweek. So, next time you're thinking of skimming a newspaper on the weekend, or watching the Sunday chat shows, or reading something gay in your down-time, DON'T. Instead, read Polybius or some other ancient and get smarter.

"If History is deprived of the truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale." -Polybius