The History of Others.—The first historian of Rome was not a Roman, but a Greek—Polybius. This first history of Rome was the product of a Greek mind, and as such it was Greek scholarship for a Greek audience. There is a sense, then, in which Roman history was not at first written for Romans at all, but it belongs instead to the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides. It is Greek history, but of the Romans. Eventually the Romans produced historians like Tacitus and Livy, who wrote from the perspective of Roman experience. It is, of course, a commonplace of classical antiquity that the Romans took their culture from the Greeks, and that, of course, is an oversimplification. But it would be equally misleading to say that Rome merely experienced idea diffusion from Greece. The Greeks had produced a literature and an art far in advance of what the Romans had produced, but the Romans had their own language and their script, their own way of life, and their own traditions. These they kept even as they assimilated Greek influences, which they did, assiduously. When the Greeks fell under Roman control, the pull of the largest city in the ancient world naturally drew in Greeks, and the most cultured elements in Roman society were naturally eager to assimilate the superior culture of Greece. It would be trite to call the result a fusion, but the ultimate culture of late antiquity, which spread throughout the entire Mediterranean basin, was a fusion—we could call it Hellenism with Roman characteristics. More than a thousand years later, when Europe began its great expansionary push into the world, Europeans (the heirs of Greece and Rome) wrote histories of the peoples they encountered who had not yet written their own histories. These were histories conceived by a European mind; they were European histories, but of peoples throughout the world. It would be too much to say that the world took its culture from Europe, but the age of European expansion was, again, more than mere idea diffusion. It would not be too much to say that anthropology has its ultimate origins in Europeans encountering peoples from all the world, and eventually passing beyond history and attempting a scientific treatment of man as such. The idea of universal history gives way to the idea of the universal science of the human, made universal through the universality of the scientific method.
