The Histories of Polybius (Vol.1&2). Polybius

      Introduction

       Table of Contents

      I. Polybius

      Fortune cast the life of Polybius in stirring times. His special claim to our admiration is that he understood the importance in the history of the world of the changes which were passing under his eyes, and exerted himself to trace the events which immediately preceded them, and from which they sprang, while it was yet possible to see and question surviving participators in them; to examine places, before they had lost all marks of the great events of which they had been the scene; and records or monuments before time had cast a doubt upon their meaning or authenticity. Nor is this ordinary praise. Men are apt to turn their eyes upon the past, as holding all that is worthy of contemplation, while they fail to take note of history “in the making,” or to grasp the importance of the transactions of their own day. But as every year has its decisive influence on the years which succeed it, the greatest benefactor of posterity is the man who understands and records events as they pass with care and sincerity. Laborious compilation, from the study and comparison of ancient records and monuments, has its value: it may often be all that it is possible to obtain; it may not unfrequently even serve to correct statements of contemporaries which have been deformed by carelessness or coloured by prejudice. But the best compilation is infinitely inferior in interest and instructiveness to the barest report of a contemporary. And when such a man is also an eye-witness of much that he relates; when he knew and conversed with many of the chief actors in the great events which he records; when again he tells us of transactions so remote in time, that all written documents have necessarily perished, and those in more durable bronze and stone all but followed in their train, then indeed the interest rises to the highest pitch. Like Herodotus and Thucydides, then, Polybius tells us of his own times, and of the generations immediately preceding them. It is true that the part of his work which has survived in a complete form deals with a period before his own day, just as the greater part of the history of Herodotus does, but in the larger part of the fragments he is writing with even more complete personal knowledge than Thucydides. He had, again, neither the faculty for story-telling possessed by Herodotus nor the literary and dramatic force of Thucydides. The language which he spoke and wrote had lost the magic of style; had lost the lucidity and grace of Sophocles, and the rugged vigour and terseness of Thucydides. Nor had he apparently acquired any of those artifices which, while they sometimes weary us in the later rhetoricians, yet generally serve to make their writings the easiest and pleasantest of reading. Equally remote again is his style from the elaborate and involved manner of Plutarch, with its huge compound words built up of intricate sentences, more like difficult German than Greek. Polybius had no tricks of this sort;3 but his style lacks logical order and clearness. It seems rather the language of a man of affairs, who had had neither leisure to study style, nor taste to read widely with a view to literature as such. But after all it is Greek, and Greek that still retained its marvellous adaptability to every purpose, to every shade of thought, and every form of literature. Nor is his style in the purely narrative parts of his work wanting in a certain force, derived from singleness and directness of purpose. He “speaks right on,” and turns neither to the right hand nor the left. It is when he reflects and argues and moralises, that his want of literary skill sometimes makes him difficult and involved; and though the thought is essentially just, and his point of view wonderfully modern, we continually feel the want of that nameless charm which the Greeks called χάρις.

      His bent for historical composition was fortunately encouraged by the circumstances of his life, which gave Polybius special opportunities of satisfying his curiosity and completing his knowledge. Not only was he the son of a man who had held the highest office in the league, and so must have heard the politics and history of Achaia discussed from his earliest youth; not only from early manhood was he himself in the thick of political business; but he knew the sovereigns of Egypt and Pergamus, of Macedonia and Syria, and the Roman generals who conquered the latter. He had visited a Roman camp and witnessed its practical arrangements and discipline. And his enforced residence of sixteen years in Italy and Rome was, by the good fortune of his introduction to Aemilius Paullus and his sons, turned into an opportunity of unrivalled advantage for studying the laws, military discipline, and character of the imperial people whose world conquest he chronicles. Unlike his fellow-exiles, he did not allow his depressing circumstances to numb his faculties, exasperate his temper, or deaden his curiosity. He won the confidence of the leading men at Rome; and seems, while pushing on his inquiries with untiring vigour, to have used his influence for the benefit of his countrymen, and of all Greek subjects of Rome.

      But, like so many of the writers of antiquity, he has had no one to perform for him the service he had done for others in rescuing their achievements and the particulars of their career from oblivion. Of the many testimonia collected by Schweighaeuser and others from ancient writers, scarcely one gives us any details or anecdotes of the writer, whose work they briefly describe or praise. We are reduced as usual to pick out from his own writings the scattered allusions or statements which help us to picture his character and career.

      Birth of Polybius.

      Polybius of Megalopolis was the son of Lycortas, the friend and partisan of Philopoemen, who had served the Achaean league in several capacities: as ambassador to Rome in B.C. 189, along with Diophanes, on the question of the war with Sparta,4 and to Ptolemy Epiphanes in B.C. 186, 5 and finally as Strategus in B.C. 184-183. Of the year of his birth we cannot be certain. He tells us that he was elected to go on embassy from the league to Ptolemy Epiphanes in the year of the death of that monarch (B.C. 181), although he was below the legal age.6 But we do not know for certain what that age was; although it seems likely that it was thirty, that apparently being the age at which a member of the league exercised his full privileges.7 But assuming this, we do not know how much under that age he was. Two years previously (B.C. 183) he had carried the urn at Philopoemen’s funeral. This was an office usually performed by quite young men (νεανίσκοι)8, probably not much over twenty years old. As we know that he lived to write a history of the Numantine war, which ended B.C. 1339, and that he was eighty-two at the time of his death10, we shall not, I think, be probably far wrong if we place his birth in B.C. 203 and his death in B.C. 121 as Casaubon does, who notes that the latter is just sixteen years before the birth of Cicero. But though this is a good working hypothesis, it is very far from being a demonstrated fact.

      Between B.C. 181-168 he was closely allied with his father in politics; and if we wish to have any conception of what he was doing, it is necessary to form some idea of the state of parties in the Peloponnese at the time.

      The