 The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man.Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus, of anthropology – as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies.Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology".