Polybius

“I am not unaware that my work owing to the uniformity of its composition has a certain severity, and will suit the taste and gain the approval of only one class of reader.”

Well I like him, but at some point some twit has been in possession of the last complete copy of this work. His house has been on fire and having the choice of the book or his kid he has chosen poorly. I think it says something about the quality of Polybius’s writing that even truncated as it is it’s still show more brilliant. And some of these fragments are really meaty.

In the first half of the book there are a series of character studies of various generals- Hannibal, Scipio etc- followed by some account of their doings. Scipio’s attack on New Carthage being a particular gem. I read this without access to a plan of the city but had a totally clear idea of the geography. When I got online and checked, my image and the plan were surprisingly close. A testament to the total precision of the writing.

There follows a long fragment where Polybius lays into Timaeus, a fellow historian whose work has not survived. This is far beyond literary criticism or even a hatchet job. He displays the kind of hatred and rage you normally only see in religious writing. It’s sometimes quite funny, but not always for the reason Polybius intends. It’s in total contrast to his historical writing and I did wonder if he were entirely sane.

The second half of the book recounts the final confrontation of Scipio and Hannibal in Africa. I’ve been waiting for this since volume two. There’s the most amazing scene where the two generals meet alone to parley. The young Scipio neatly representing the new barbarians on the block and the older Hannibal representing an ancient sea-faring civilisation and pleading for its existence. Scipio says “ok” and they all go and have tea. No not really. show less

This book tells the tale of the Romans’ first overseas trip in 264 BC by which they announced their arrival on the world stage. You can jump straight in and enjoy it, but by coincidence Polybius takes up pretty much where Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ history fragments and I did appreciate having read that first. In my head Rome is always the glorious empire of later years, but as Dionysius makes clear, in the beginning Rome was a barbarian city state many hundreds of miles from the show more nearest centre of civilisation; not much more than a fort where they kept their slaves. They were addicted to war. Literate, but not producing any literature. At the time Polybius’ history opens the first plays in Latin are just being staged – and the only way they’ve managed that is because one of their slaves is a Greek called Livius Andronicus who is adapting Greek New Comedy.

So all the more amazing that, having conquered the Italian peninsula, but never having gone to sea, they practice rowing movements on shore before taking on the Carthaginians. By turns I’d admire first one side and then the other. The Romans for their guts, but then dismay that such a band of animals could so wound such an ancient and stylish sea-faring civilisation. Yet when the Romans invade Africa and immediately capture twenty thousand slaves the scales do fall from one’s eyes somewhat. The Carthaginians may do things which panache, but isn’t panache the hall-mark of all good pirates?

After the account of this first Punic War, Polybius gives us the Numidian War, which is fantastic because the Berbers are a great bunch of lads but they really don’t get much of a look-in on the world stage. There’s also an account of the Romans’ second holiday when they establish a beach-head in the Balkans.

It’s worth saying something about Polybius’s style. Whereas Dionysius’ history is essentially a novel, using all the rhetorical techniques he can lay his hands on, Polybius’ technique is crystal clear and totally precise. His battle scenes are the best I’ve read. If you want to know how they killed each other back in the day then this is the book for you. I definitely felt as if I were reading a reliable history rather than a story and for the later events I got the impression he had spoken to eye-witnesses – which is certainly possible given the time-frame.

But then at the end of the volume he gives some Greek history. His account can be a little confusing and I was just thinking it all might be a little too close to home for him when he suddenly emits the most astounding stream of bile against a historian called Phylarchus. Is it good history? Perhaps not. But very entertaining. show less

Primary classical sources often prove quite tantalizing: what has been preserved remains compelling and important, but highlights all the more what has been lost, at least in the present moment.

Polybius well represents this tendency. Polybius was a Greek historian of the second century BCE and was an active participant in Greek life and politics in its twilight period.

He was highly regarded for two reasons: he was a very thorough historian, very much taking on the mantle of Thucydides, show more and, having quite astutely perceived the deep sources of political and governmental strength in Rome, wrote with the expectation Rome would be a long-term and significant power.

We can understand why the Romans would happily have Polybius’ Histories, his grand exposition of Mediterranean affairs from the outbreak of the First Punic War through the end of Carthage in the Third Punic War (246-164 BCE). And yet, as can be seen in the Delphi Classics edition of the Complete Works of Polybius, only the first five books of the Histories has come down to us.

If you’re interested in how the Romans won the First Punic War, and how they courted disaster time and time again against Hannibal in 218-216 BCE through the Battle of Cannae, and if you are really interested in all the internal warfare and conflict among the Greek leagues and the political and military affairs of the Macedonian kingdoms in the late third century BCE, then this book is for you.

We have a lot of data regarding what took place in the First Punic War and the beginning of the Second Punic War for this reason. Even though we do have some other sources for the rest of the Second Punic War and all which followed afterward, the lack of Polybius’ voice means we have far less detailed understanding of how it all went down.

A lot of what happened in history was well-documented at the time, and we have lost far more than what has been preserved of that documentation. It’s a humbling reminder as we consider what we know, and what we cannot know, about what took place in the past. show less

Waterfield's translation was just what I needed. Many years ago, I tried reading Polybius and ended up giving it that type of college age reading that means I skipped whole chapters, read through others sections muddle headed and eventually put it down knowing that I had something great in front of me but was simply not ready for it. I lost the previous translation shortly after my attempt and never tried reading Polybius again. I think Waterfield's translation is both readable and show more digestible for the serious reader who is not a professional historian. Though it was disappointing to only read up to the Battle of Cannae, if all or much of the fragments of the other parts of the Carthaginian Wars were included, I might have chosen not to read the details of the war in Macedonia and the Peloponnese or the details regarding the events leading to war between Antiochus and Ptolemy in Coele-Syria. Reading about all three theaters of war brings home the universality of Polybius' objective. Polybius was a critical historian of a very high rank. I believe in some ways, he surpassed Thucydides, not necessarily in accuracy but in his abilities to instruct the reader. He surpassed Thucydides because he was able to apply broader experiences, with similar abilities to a more historically daunting subject: the rise of the Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean, which for Polybius and his original audience was, "the entire known world". show less