Exhibit 1219 ยท Classical history (translation)
Polybius, Histories, Book VI, the cycle of constitutions and the mixed constitution (Shuckburgh translation)
This is the regular cycle of constitutional revolutions, and the natural order in which constitutions change, are transformed, and return again to their original stage.
Polybius sets out six forms of government that change into one another in a natural cycle, and says that each unmixed form is perverted into the vice peculiar to it. He credits Lycurgus with combining the best features of the forms so that each power checks the others.
- Source
- Polybius; translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh
- Date
- c. 150 BCE (Shuckburgh translation, 1889)
- Quoted from
- Book VI, ch. 9, Gutenberg ebook 44125 (vol. 1 of 2), plain text
- Grade
- Primary record
- Document
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44125
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Mixed-constitution remedy read at Book VI ch. 10: 'every form of government that was unmixed, and rested on one species of power, was unstable'. Polybius's own account is a hypothesis about natural change, offered with the caveat that dates may be mistaken.