Polybius historian
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Histories (Polybius)
Account of the rise of Rome by Polybius
| Author | Polybius |
|---|---|
| Language | Ancient Greek |
| Genre | History |
Polybius' Histories (Ancient Greek: ἹστορίαιHistoríai) were originally written in 40 volumes, only the first five of which are extant in their entirety. The bulk of the work was passed down through collections of excerpts kept in libraries in the Byzantine Empire. Polybius, a historian from the Greek city of Megalopolis in Arcadia, was taken as a hostage to Rome after the Roman victory in the Third Macedonian War (171–168 BC), and there he began to write an account of the rise of Rome to a great power.
Content
Polybius' Histories begin in the year 264 BC and end in 146 BC (Polybius was born around 200 BC and died around 117 BC). He is primarily concerned with the 53 years in which Ancient Rome became a dominant world power. This period, from 220–167 BC, saw Rome subjugate Carthage and gain control over Hellenistic Greece. Books I through V cover the affairs of important states at the time (Ptolemaic Egypt, Hellenistic Gree
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Polybius
Ancient Greek historian and politician
For other uses, see Polybius (disambiguation).
Polybius (; Ancient Greek: Πολύβιος, Polýbios; c. 200 – c. 118 BC) was a Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He is noted for his work The Histories, a universal history documenting the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries BC. It covered the period of 264–146 BC, recording in detail events in Italy, Iberia, Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Africa, and documented the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars among many others.
Polybius's Histories is important not only for being the only Hellenistic historical work to survive in any substantial form, but also for its analysis of constitutional change and the mixed constitution. Polybius's discussion of the separation of powers in government, of checks and balances to limit power, and his introduction of "the people", all influenced Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the framers of the United States Constitution.&# Polybius is the most important source for the rise of Roman imperialism during the Middle Roman Republic (c. 265–c. 150 BCE). By ancient historiographical standards, his work is of the highest quality, and in this regard he is often compared with Thucydides. To be sure, his Greek prose style is inelegant—so much so that the ancient literary critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarked that no one could endure reading his work to the end (On Composition, 4). But Polybius’s stringent demands for historical accuracy, as well as the monumental importance of his theme—accounting for Rome’s rise to world power—more than compensate for his deficiencies in style. His political theory, and especially his ideas on the mixed constitution and government by a system of checks and balances, has had a profound impact on subsequent political thinkers in the Western tradition. The ancient literary critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Com
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Polybius
Introduction
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