The Histories

"The ancient writer Polybius narrates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean within a 53-year period, an achievement that he calls unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes. For example, he sees Hannibal’s attack on Italy as caused by Hannibal’s ambitious moral character, which was incited to action by the unfair conditions imposed by Rome after the First Punic War. Now I don’t think that Polybius is right about this. It is Hannibal’s ideas and those of his supporters that led to war, not his character. He thought that he could get glory for himself and his city through war, while avenging the earlier mistreatment by Rome: that was the real cause of this 20-year disaster. So the foreign policy of Carthage was led by this man’s ideas and the actions that followed from them. The warrior ideas that dominated both Rome and Carthage made war inevitable, even though Polybius does not quite see the cause this way. Yes, he’s one of the first people to really lay out a method of approaching the causes of war. For example, were I to ask what caused World War II , some people would say Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. But Polybius would say no, that was the start of the war. The cause of the war has to be prior to that. So he lays out proximate causes as well as deeper, longstanding causes. Given this perspective, the cause of World War II would have to be something like Germany’s acceptance of a sacrificial war of conquest as a means to national aggrandisement, and their willingness to follow a dictator into such destruction. In other words, the ideas held by the Germans were the truest causes of the war. The attack on Poland would be the beginning of the war, and a consequence of the earlier causes."

"Polybius is writing in the middle part of the 2nd century BCE, around 140 BCE. He is Greek, and he is writing in Greek. In some ways, he’s writing for a Greek audience, because what had happened in his lifetime and he had been witness to was the subjugation of the Greek world by the Romans. It was the passing of the cultural and military torch from ancient Greece to Rome. What Polybius is doing is convincing his fellow Greeks that this is the way of history, this is inevitable, this is what was bound to happen. These are our conquerors. Polybius spent about 15 years as a hostage in Rome because he’d been quite an important Greek politician. While he was there, he got to know some very prominent people, including the general Scipio Aemilianus. They became good friends, and Polybius went with him on his expeditions and witnessed the final extinction of Carthage. He describes Scipio weeping as he watches Carthage destroyed, because he realizes that this is the end of the great Carthaginian civilization. Rome is now the big Mediterranean power. But Scipio knows, in his heart of hearts, that this is going to come back on Rome and that Rome will end that way also. So he sees this vision of the future now. Polybius is wonderful for telling stories like that. He is a good read. He’s quite analytical and there are more narrative historians coming up. But Polybius is great on Hannibal, for example, because he went and interviewed people who had witnessed the Hannibalic invasion in the first and second decades of the 3rd century BCE. He’s writing 70 years later, but he did his boots-on-the-ground research and tried to trace Hannibal’s path across the Alps and things like that. So it’s really exciting history from someone who lived it and had access to many of the great players from that particular time. As well as Carthage, he also witnessed the fall of Corinth. Polybius also has great descriptions of Roman politics and the Roman mixed constitution. Those are probably some of the most influential things ever written by a Roman because that is what people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read when they were setting up their constitution . Yes. He’s writing about a period of around 120 years and he begins it with such an arresting statement. Rome has just become master of the Mediterranean by defeating the Greeks and the Carthaginians. He’s looking back at the previous century, and he says, “Who could be so indolent or indifferent as not to want to know how the Romans made themselves masters of most of the known world?” And when you read it, you think he must be writing from the time of Augustus. But no, he’s writing from the point of view of 150 years before Augustus. So we get this sense of the grandeur that Rome became in about 150 BCE, and that’s going to continue after that."