Polybius

Græsk historiker. Boede i Italien.

• Pydna, 168 f.Kr.

Historian from Megalopolis, who was sent to Rome as a hostage after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 168 BC. There, he became the tutor of the general Lucius Aemilius Paulus's two sons, the younger later to be known as Scipio Africanus the Younger. The two became friends, and when the hostages were free to return to Greece, Polybius joined Scipio in his African campaign.

When Carthage was sacked in 146 BC, ending the Punic Wars, he was present. He mainly wrote about the rising Rome.

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Polybius (c.203-122 BCE) was born in Megalopolis, Arcadia, a Greek city that was an active member of the Achaean League, of which his father, Lycortas, was at one time leader. Polybius advanced politically in the League and reached a position from which he, too, could have become its leader. However, after the Romans conquered Macedonia, they stabilized their control of the area by purging Greek cities of their leaders. One thousand of the principal Achaeans were deported to Italy. Polybius was fortunate in that L. Aemilius Paulus interceded for him and made him tutor of his sons Scipio and Fabius in Rome. A friendship developed that led Scipio to take Polybius with him as an advisor on political and military matters.

Polybius was thus able to move in the highest circles in Rome and to witness major Roman military campaigns in the Mediterranean region. This gave him a unique opportunity as a Greek to analyze the successful expansion of Rome and to record the principles involved as a lesson for future statesmen, notably those in Greece, who he hoped would profit from his work. Polybius’s analysis is contained in his Histories—forty volumes describing the constitution of Rome and the sequence of Roman conquests. It has a strong political slant and represents an early attempt of a universal history rather than the history of a single people. Polybius set out to show how many different regions were merged by the Romans into a single whole.

He was clearly aware of the dangers of accepting fables as history: he sought the truth rather than idle and unprofitable tales. Polybius remarked acidly of other historians that to believe things that were beyond the limits of possibility showed a childish simplicity or the mark of limited intelligence. His particular interest in how Rome could organize to gain control of the world around the Mediterranean led him to analyze different types of constitution and to propose a theory of how these change from one to another in an inevitable cycle (kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mob rule, and tyranny again). He had great praise for the constitution of Rome, but seemed to think that it might eventually succumb like others, if not from conquest, then from internal sources. These views are contained in Book VI of his work, from which the following extracts, except the first three, are taken.