The Histories

What It Is

A history of Rome's rise, written in Greek around the middle of the second century BC by a man who had every reason to hate the subject and chose to understand it instead. Polybius commanded cavalry for the Achaean League, and in 168 BC he was shipped to Italy as one of a thousand political hostages. He stayed seventeen years, attached himself to the household of Scipio Aemilianus, and watched the machine from the inside.

He planned forty books. Books 1 to 5 survive whole; the rest reaches us in fragments and Byzantine excerpts, except Book 6, which survives because later readers would not let it go.

The writing is not literature and does not want to be. Polybius calls his method pragmatic history, meaning history written for men who will have to make decisions, and he is contemptuous of historians who write to entertain. He is opinionated, digressive, certain he is right, and forever interrupting to say how badly someone else handled the same material. The crankiness is part of the pleasure.

Why It Matters

Book 6 is one of the most consequential chapters ever written about politics. In it Polybius asks why constitutions rot, whether the rot can be arrested, and what Rome in particular had done about it, and the answer he reaches is the one the modern world has been arguing with ever since. That analysis went to Machiavelli, to Montesquieu, to John Adams, and into the design of the American constitution. The men who designed the American constitution had read him, and the vocabulary they reached for was substantially his.

He also invented something else worth having: the idea that history should be universal. Before him, histories were about a people or a war. Polybius argued that events had become interlocked, that what happened in Africa now settled what happened in Greece, and that a historian must therefore treat the whole Mediterranean as one system. He saw the world as a system at the moment it became one.

And he is our best evidence for the Second Punic War. Where Livy tells the story, Polybius interviewed the men who fought it and walked the ground himself.

Before You Read

Twenty to twenty-five hours for a good selection, and it is more work than Herodotus and less than Thucydides. The prose is plain, and the difficulty is stamina rather than comprehension.

Read Book 1 and Book 3 for the wars with Carthage, and then read Book 6 slowly and twice. If you only ever read one part of Polybius, that is the part, but it lands with far more weight once you have watched the constitution he is describing actually fight a war.

He lectures. Long stretches on how history ought to be written, and on the failings of Timaeus, are commonly skimmed and no harm done. Keep a map beside you; the campaigns are unfollowable without one.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics, 2010) — recommended. The first new English Polybius in thirty years, and the only one that gets the tone right: peremptory, impatient, certain. Brian McGing's notes carry you through a text that assumes you already know who everyone is. The cost: it is a selection rather than the complete surviving text, and Oxford's endnotes mean constant flipping. View on Amazon →
• Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Classics, 1979), published as The Rise of the Roman Empire. The version most readers have used for forty years, with a fine introduction by F. W. Walbank, the great modern authority on Polybius. Footnotes at the foot of the page, which is a real convenience. The cost: a narrower selection than Waterfield's, and the English is smoother than the Greek deserves.
• W. R. Paton, revised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht (Loeb Classical Library, six volumes, 2010 to 2012). Everything that survives, Greek on the facing page, thoroughly updated. The scholar's Polybius. The cost: six volumes, a serious price, and a translation built for accuracy rather than reading.

Take Waterfield. Go to the Loeb only when you find you want the fragments.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read him for the argument, not the events. Polybius is not trying to move you and will not reward you for looking for it. He is trying to explain a mechanism, and the mechanism is why the book has outlived the war it describes.

Read him against Livy on the same campaigns. Polybius is the man who went and checked; Livy is the man who wrote it up. Set them side by side and you learn more about how history gets made than either says outright.

Read the introduction first here. McGing gives you the political geography without walking through the narrative, and you will need it.

The common mistake is to skip Book 6 as dry theory and stay with the fighting. It is the reason the book survived.