previous next

The Unthinking Multitude

What happened in the case of Perseus in regard to the feeling of the multitude was very similar to this. For if any one had pulled them up and asked them plainly, in so many words, whether they wished such great power to fall to one man, and were desirous of trying the effect of an utterly irresponsible despotism, I presume that they would have promptly bethought themselves, recanted all they had said, and gone to the other extreme of feeling. Or if some one had briefly recalled to their recollection all the tyrannical acts of the royal house of Macedonia from which the Greeks had suffered, and all the benefits they had received from the Romans, I imagine they would have at once and decisively changed their minds. However, for the present, at the first burst of thoughtless enthusiasm, the people showed unmistakable signs of joy at the news, being delighted at the unlooked-for appearance of a champion able to cope with Rome. I say this much to prevent any one, in ignorance of human nature, from bringing a rash charge of ingratitude against the Greeks for the feelings which they displayed at that time. . . .

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

Robert B. Strassler provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Theodorus Büttner-Wobst after L. Dindorf, 1893)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (2 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 41-42, commentary, 42.29
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: