Man, some of those ancient historians, they knew! They’d have figured out our time in a matter of minutes.
Polybius, who died in 118 B.C., lived as a hostage in Rome and deeply studied Roman life and politics. Two things he wrote jumped out at me today.
First, he admired Rome’s government, which he saw as a system of checks and balances that prevented any single branch of government from dominating the others. Our own country’s founders, who had read Polybius and others, adopted this model for our Constitution. Idiots and villains have been trying to topple it ever since.
Second, his study of history convinced him that tyranny most often arises in response to chaos and instability: when the desperate populace turns to a strong man to pull them out of the ditch. But eventually, he said, government sinks back into chaos, a new tyrant emerges from the melee, and the whole damned cycle repeats itself. He thought the Romans had found a solution; but if he’d lived some seventy years longer, he would have seen they hadn’t.
Polybius has no comfort to offer us. Thanks be to God, we have the Bible, God’s word. His laws, His precepts, will protect whoever embraces them. We are only forced to live in that hopeless political cycle if we rely on man’s word–and the false wisdom of a fallen world. Polybius did the best he could, but he lived in the wrong time and the wrong place.
But he would have felt at home at our Constitutional Convention. He didn’t have the Bible; America’s founders did. I think he would have rejoiced in it.
Let’s not lose it.
