Polybius sculpture (image courtesy of Britannica)

By Carole Hyde –

What would we do without Polybius to tell us of Hannibal’s march to Italy? This historian of Rome overlapped in life (ca. 200-118 BCE) with Hannibal by twenty years; with the Carthaginian’s threat still a living memory, Polybius had access to eye-witnesses, including veterans of Hannibal’s campaign, and wrote what is considered its most accurate and dispassionate history. He later saw and recorded the destruction of Carthage and the domination by Rome of the Mediterranean world. 

Polybius had an interesting and crucial road to becoming the historian of the Roman rise. As a young man he was notable in the political and military affairs of the Achaean League at the time that Rome was expanding into the eastern Mediterranean. He was born into a leading family in Megalopolis and took a role in the complicated politics of the Greek states and their response to Rome’s growing encroachment and was also a Greek cavalry officer (hipparchos). The Romans, to pacify disaffected Greeks, exiled Polybius and a thousand others of his class and political visibility to Italy and dispersed them among unimportant cities to wither away. (A small number of them were finally allowed to return to Greece when “fit for the undertaker.”) (1) This bloodless decapitation of Greek elites exemplified the Roman genius for domination and governance, which would become the theme of Polybius’ historical work.

For the writing of history, Polybius’s exile was fortunate. He was sent to Rome and prospered. The Romans appreciated his political and military skills. (2) They seemed to like him. He developed relationships with Rome’s governing class, especially the Aemelianus family, and became the tutor to Carthage’s future nemesis Scipio Aemelianus. He was allowed great freedom. “He interacted with the world’s most powerful people and took part in politics at the highest level. He witnessed and was himself involved in many of the great Mediterranean events he wrote about.” (1) 

Polybius seemed to embrace the cause of Rome, writing of its unstoppable rise to domination of the Mediterranean world. He identified Rome’s success with its efficiency in governance and its requirements of civic obligation—all parts working for the greater good. The Roman army was central in his theories of Rome’s success, and he wrote about its discipline, and about the vigor of the Romans but also lamented its need for more cavalry after Cannae. (3) Romans were pleased to have their story in his hands. 

 “It was Polybius’s most original thought that the virtual unification of the known world under Rome made a new genre of historiography both possible and necessary. For the first time a historian could write authentic universal history with a unified theme—Rome’s ascent to world power…..The new epoch required a new historiography and this in turn implied new narrative techniques in order to register the convergence of events…developments in different areas had to be correlated without creating confusion in the minds of readers who could not be expected to have maps at their disposal.” (2)

Earlier historians wrote history as a series of discrete events, or they wrote at a remove in time and place. To write about Rome, to write in a new way, Polybius became a geographer—a kind of forensic historian. His research was done not in libraries but across land and sea. He himself walked and retraced Hannibal’s path through the Alps and onto the great battlefields, and he later sailed across the Mediterranean to see the razing of Carthage. He witnessed events and participated where he could. “Direct experience of war and diplomacy, first-hand acquaintance with places and men, consummate skill in cross-questioning witnesses, and finally a sober investigation of causes, with due allowance for chance and luck, were the qualities which Polybius claimed for his work.” (1)  

Polybius identified with Homer’s hero Odysseus. In his works he quoted from the Odyssey: “….he experienced wars of men and woeful waves. He saw the towns of many men and got to know their mind, and in his heart suffered many grievous things on the ocean.” Polybius then wrote: “It seems to me that the dignity of history demands just such a man.” (1)

Polybius remained a Greek. He wrote about Rome, but he really wrote for the Greeks. His purpose was to advise them on how to deal with Rome. The destruction of Carthage and later of armies in Macedonia and Syria presented a dangerous time for the Greeks. Polybius wrote to explain Roman success, but more than this he explained to the Greeks why they failed to maintain their independence, and “why they now had to obey Roman orders.” He described for them “how the third century had developed, the phalanx yielding to the legion.” 

(3) To describe the historical enormity of the destruction of Carthage, he wrote about the Greek reaction to it and put forth their various views of the siege. Among them, he included the increasing ruthlessness and treachery of the Romans, while being careful not to state his own opinion. His writings were a warning to the Greeks. The scholarship on Polybius and his historiography is immense and technical, and is probably the life’s work or much it for scholars like F. W. Walbank and Brian McGing:

Greek readers never ranked him with Herodotus, Thucydides, or Xenophon, perhaps because of his prose, and perhaps because Rome’s rise told them of their own decline. (2) Polybius traveled far and wide, to Spain and beyond the Mediterranean and the Gates of Heracles. As with his Greek hero, he enjoyed a long life. Still vigorous at the age of 82 he fell off his horse and died. Lucky for history, this historian’s life is well-recorded as he became like Thucydides, the epitome of a good historian who thought out underlying reasons for events and wrote about places and events he knew from personal experience of his own two feet rather than formulating events from an armchair. 

Notes:

[1] Polybius’ Histories, by Prof. Brian McGing, Chapter 6 “The Historian as Homeric Hero.” This essay details the complicated affairs of the Greek city states and Polybius’ role in them and Polybius’ idea of the historian.

[2] Essay by Arnaldo Momigliano—a review of F. W. Walbank’s Polybius, “The Historian’s Skin,” NYRB, July 18, 1974. This is a very interesting and enjoyable piece on Polybius as a Greek writing about Rome, maybe the single most interesting essay I read.

[3] “Essays in Memory of F. W. Walbank.”  Chapter by Andrew Erskine: “How to Rule the World: Polybius Book 6 Reconsidered.” The essays analyze Polybius’ theories of Rome’s rise and decline.

[4] Polybius excerpts presented in Stanford’s CLA 82 2nd Punic War, Hannibal, Fate of Carthage 2025 class

[5] On an incidental note, the exile of the Greek intelligentsia brought to mind an essay, “Occupied” in NYRB by Marilynne Robinson, on our own contemporary affairs.