V. POLYBIUS

If the Hellenistic age inspired but one great poet, it produced an unprecedented quantity and variety of prose. It invented the imaginary conversation, the essay, and the encyclopedia; it continued the tradition of writing brief and vivid biographies; and in the Roman sequel Greek literature would add the sermon and the novel. Oratory was a dying mode, for it had depended upon the game of politics, litigation before popular courts, and the democratic right to talk. The letter became a favorite vehicle, for both communication and literature; now were established the epistolary forms and phrases that we find in Cicero, and even the famous exordium dear to our grandfathers: “Hoping that this finds you as well as it leaves me.”²⁸

Historiography flourished. Ptolemy I, Aratus of Achaea, and Pyrrhus of Epirus wrote memoirs of their campaigns, establishing a tradition that culminated in Caesar. The Egyptian high priest Manetho wrote in Greek an Aigyptiaka, or Annals of Egypt, which bundled the Pharaohs somewhat arbitrarily into those dynasties that classify them to this day. Berosus, high priest of the Chaldeans, dedicated to Antiochus I a history of Babylon based upon the cuneiform records. Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, startled the Greek world, about 300, with a book on India. “There is among the Brahmans,” said a suggestive passage, “a sect of philosophers who . . . hold that God is the Word, by which they mean not articulate speech but the discourse of reason”;²⁹ here again was that doctrine of Logos which was destined to make such an impress upon Christian theology. Timaeus af Tauromenium (Taormina), having been exiled from Sicily by Agathocles (317), traveled widely in Spain and Gaul, and then settled down in Athens to write a history of Sicily and the West. He was an industrious student, so anxious to include everything that some of his rivals called him “an old ragpicker.”³⁰ He labored to arrive at an accurate chronology, and hit upon the scheme of dating events by Olympiads. He criticized his predecessors severely, and was lucky enough to die before seeing the brutal attack made upon his work by Polybius.³¹

The greatest of the Hellenistic historians, and the only Greek fit to make a triad with Herodotus and Thucydides, was born at Megalopolis, in Arcadia (208). His father, Lycortas, was one of the leading men of the Achaean League, being ambassador to Rome in 189 and strategos in 184. The boy was brought up in the odor of politics, was trained as a soldier under Philopoemen, fought in the Roman campaign against the Gauls in Asia Minor, was associated with his father on an embassy to Egypt (181), and was made the League’s hipparchos, or commander of the cavalry, in 169.³² He paid for his prominence: when the Romans punished the League for supporting Perseus against them they took a thousand leading Achaeans to Rome as hostages, and Polybius was among them (167). For sixteen years he suffered exile, and at times, he tells us, “utter loss of spirit and paralysis of mind.”³³ But the younger Scipio befriended him, introduced him to the Scipionic circle of educated Romans, and persuaded the Senate, when it was scattering the other exiles throughout Italy, to let Polybius live with him in Rome. He accompanied Scipio on many campaigns, gave him valuable military advice, explored for him the coasts of Spain and Africa, and stood beside him at the burning of Carthage (146). He had received his freedom in 151, and in 149 he was employed as the representative of Rome in arranging a modus vivendi between the cities of Greece and their distant master, the Roman Senate. He must have performed this ungrateful task well, for several cities honored him with monuments—though one can never tell in what tense man’s gratitude is felt. Having lived through sixty full years of action, he retired to write a Treatise on Tactics, a Life of Philopoemen, and his immense Histories. He died like a gentleman by falling from his horse as he was returning from a hunt, at the age of eighty-two.

No man ever wrote history from a wider background of education, travel, and experience. His work was conceived on a grand scale, and proposed to tell the story, not only of Greece but of “the whole world” (i.e., the Mediterranean nations) from 221 to 146 B.C. “Such is the plan I propose; but all depends upon Fortune’s granting me a life long enough to execute it.”³⁴ He rightly felt that the center of political history, in the period which he covered, lay in Rome; he gave his book unity by making Rome the focus of its events, and studying with a diplomat’s curiosity the methods by which Rome, with British casualness, had mastered the Mediterranean world.³⁵ He admired the Romans intensely, for he had seen them in their greatest epoch, and had known chiefly the best of them in Scipio’s group; they had, he felt, just those qualities that were fatally lacking in Greek character and government. Himself an aristocrat, and befriended by aristocrats, he had no sympathy with what seemed to him mere mob rule in the later stages of Greek democracy. Political history appeared to him to be a repetitious cycle of monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. The best escape from this cycle, he thought, was through a “mixed constitution” like that of Lycurgus or Rome—an enfranchised but limited citizenry choosing its own magistrates, but checked by the power of a continuous and aristocratic senate.³⁶ It was from this viewpoint that he wrote down the record of his times.

Polybius is “the historians’ historian” because he is as interested in his method as in his subject. He likes to talk about his plan of procedure, and philosophizes at every opportunity. Humanly he pictures his own qualifications as ideal. He insists that history should be written by those who have seen—or have directly consulted others who have seen—the events to be described. He denounces Timaeus for having relied on his ears rather than his eyes, and tells with pride of his own travels in search of data, documents, and geographical veracity; he reminds us how, in returning from Spain to Italy, he crossed the Alps by the same pass that Hannibal had used, and how he went down into the very toe of Italy to decipher an inscription left by Hannibal in Brutium.³⁷ He proposes to make his history as accurate as “the magnitude of the work and its comprehensive treatment” will allow;³⁸ and he succeeds, so far as we can say, better than any other Greek except Thucydides. He argues that the historian should have been a man of affairs, versed in the actual processes of statesmanship, politics, and war; otherwise he will never understand the behavior of states or the course of history.³⁹ He is a realist and a rationalist; he pierces the moral phrases of diplomats to the actual motives of policy. It amuses him to observe how easily men can be deceived, singly or en masse, and even repeatedly by the same tricks.⁴⁰ “What is good,” says a scandalous presage of Machiavelli, “very seldom coincides with what is advantageous, and few are those who can combine the two and adapt them to each other.”⁴¹ He accepts the Stoic theology of a Divine Providence, but he merely pities the popular cults of his day, and smiles at stories of supernatural intervention.⁴² He recognizes the role of chance in history, and the occasional efficacy of great men,⁴³ but he is resolved to lay bare the factual and often impersonal chain of causes and effects, so that history may be a lantern of understanding held up to the present and the future.⁴⁴ “There is no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past”; and “the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of history”;⁴⁵ “it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.”⁴⁶ The best method of history, he thinks, will be that which sees the life of a nation as an organic unity, and weaves the story of each part into the life history of the whole. “He who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a just view of history as a whole is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.”⁴⁷

Of the forty books into which Polybius divided his Histories, time has preserved five, and the epitomists have rescued substantial fragments of the rest. It is a great pity that the execution of this vast conception is marred by degenerate Greek, peevish critiques of other historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with politics and war, and an absurd segmentation of the narrative into Olympiads, giving the history of all the Mediterranean nations in each four-year period, and leading to exasperating digressions and a baffling discontinuity. Sometimes, as in the story of Hannibal’s invasion, Polybius mounts to drama and eloquence, but he reacts so strongly against the florid rhetoric popular among his immediate predecessors that he makes it a point of honor to be dull.⁴⁸ “No one,” said an ancient critic, “ever read him through.”⁴⁹ The world has almost forgotten him; but historians will long continue to study him because he was one of the greatest theorists and practitioners of historiography; because he dared to take a wide view and write a “universal history”; and because, above all, he understood that mere facts are worthless except through their interpretation, and that the past has no value except as our roots and our illumination.