Polybius was born around 200 bce into an aristocratic house of Megalopolis, an important member of the Achaean Confederation of Peloponnesian Greek states. Polybius’ father Lykortas had served several times during the 180s in the confederation’s highest office, that of strategos, or general. His brother Thearidas also played a significant role in Achaean politics, serving on two important diplomatic embassies to Rome: in 159/8 concerning a border dispute involving Athens, Delos, and Achaea (32.7.1), and again in 147/6 concerning harsh Achaean treatment of a Roman legate (38.10.1-3). Polybius’ own political career began spectacularly. He was elected to Achaea’s second-highest post, that of hipparchos or cavalry commander, for 170/69, when he was around 30, probably the earliest age of eligibility for that important political office. But international events abruptly ended Polybius’ political career as an important statesman in Greece, in particular closing off to him the strategeia, or Achaean high command, election to which must have seemed almost a foregone conclusion for him. After crushing the Macedonian king Perseus in battle at Pydna on the northeast coast of Greece in 168, the Romans rounded up some one thousand Greek politicians suspected of uncertain loyalty to Rome and deported them to Italy, to languish as political prisoners for some sixteen years. Polybius was among these hostages.
It was probably around this time that Polybius, who comments on frustrated statesmen’s taking solace in scholarship (3.59.4-5), turned to writing a universal history of Rome’s rise to world power. Over the next twenty-odd years, as exile and political prisoner, Polybius witnessed Rome’s encroaching involvement in Achaean affairs, Achaea’s defiant resistance to Roman power and military annihilation at the hands of the Roman commander L. Mummius, and the disappearance of Achaea as an independent political entity in Greece, punctuated in 146 by Rome’s horrific destruction of the venerable city-state of Corinth (Gruen 1976). Polybius’ own catastrophic political fortunes, therefore, proved to be a boon for modern historians of the ancient Mediterranean world, since they created the conditions for the composition of our most important ancient account of Rome’s greatest period of imperial expansion (Champion 1997).
The international political landscape must have seemed vastly different to Polybius from what it had been during his formative years. From the late third century bce onwards, to be sure, Rome had already occupied a prominent place in Greek international relations, but under the direction of Polybius’ political hero, the Achaean statesman Philopoemen, Achaea acted as an independent political agent in Greece in these years. Indeed, throughout his political career, Philopoemen adamantly guarded Achaean political autonomy vis-a-vis Rome (24.13.1-7), and in October 198 Achaea entered into an understanding with Rome on equal terms against the Macedonian king Philip V (Livy 32.19.1-23.3; Aymard 1938: 79-102).
But this period marked the beginning of the end of a long-standing geopolitical configuration in the Greek world. In the traditional constellation of Greek international power politics, which was to disappear during Polybius’ lifetime, the Achaean Confederation was for the most part preoccupied with two rival powers and frequent enemies to the north, the Macedonian monarchy and the Aetolian Confederation in north-central Greece, across the Gulf of Corinth. Achaean relations with Macedonia oscillated between reluctant acceptance of Macedonian hegemony in the Peloponnese and outright belligerence, and Polybius’ own political stances on Macedonia are ambivalent (Walbank 1970). The Achaean and Aetolian Confederations, on the other hand, were almost always at loggerheads, and warfare between the two federal states was a frequent occurrence in the third century bce.
World History
