I think too that the very thing that among other people is viewed unfavourably is, among the Romans, a source of cohesion: I mean their respect of the gods. For it is developed to such an extraordinary extent among them—both in their private affairs and in the common business of the community—that nothing is treated as more important than this. This fact seems astonishing to many people.(Polybius, Histories 6.56.6–8)A Moral EmpireWe are, in many ways, still Greeks when we contemplate the rise of Rome. It is not just that we rely heavily on Greek narrative accounts; nor even that we share with our Greek witnesses—Polybius and Diodorus, Dionysius and Plutarch among many others—a sense of ourselves as outsiders looking in on Rome. Even more fundamentally, the way we try to understand how societies work remains firmly based in a tradition of political science that can be traced directly back to classical Greece. When Polybius asked why it was Rome that had conquered the Mediterranean, he found his answer in a unique balance of political and military institutions—a perfect blend of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements—along with the attitudes and habits they inculcated.
