Certain proximities between two distinguished but very dissimilar contemporaries, Quintilian and Tacitus, may be stated. Contemporary they were, though the former, born probably a little before A.D. 40, was older by about twenty years. Both were from outside Rome, Quintilian certainly of provincial, Spanish, origin, Tacitus very probably from one of the Galliae, yet both exemplars of Romanitas.

In 1943 one of the authors of this paper set out a case for the view that the sixth book of Polybius' Histories contained two layers, written at different times, and indicating a change in the historian's assessment of the achievements and merits of the Roman hegemony. The arguments there put forward met with some acceptance; but the recent burst of interest in the problems of the sixth book has shown that unanimity is still remote. Among scholars writing since 1943, (...) one, G. B. Cardona, is a ‘separatist’ who accepts the views of De Sanctis; another, W. Theiler, believes that three ‘layers’ of composition can be detected and isolated; three, E. Mioni, H. Erbse, and H. Ryffel, are ‘Unitarians’, but vary in the date they assign to the composition of the Histories; and K. Ziegler in his R.E. article on Polybius argues for composition in the sixties followed by a revision and publication before 146. (shrink)