Polybius (200 BC-118 BC)

He was Greek statesman and historian. Polybius was born at Megalopolis, Arcadia in southern Greece and one of the prominent states in the Achaean League. His father, a wealthy landowner, was an elected official of the Achaean League.

Polybius served the league as a diplomat and military officer. After Rome’s victory in the Macedonian War, Polybius was among one thousand prominent sentiments, who were taken to Rome as hostages. But soon he became a welcome guest and friend of grecophile leading citizen, especially of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus.

When seventeenth years later the barely three hundred surviving Achaeans were finally allowed to return home, Polybius lingered with his Roman friends for five more years and Scipio took him with him on his military campaigns in Africa.

Polybius wrote a history of Rome from the First Punic War in 264 to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 in forty books. Originally, his aim was to explain for a Greek speaking audience Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean during the half century from the Sound Punic War to the Third Macedonian War, but the later expanded the material to include the First Punic War.

In addition to his history, Polybius also wrote of life of Philopoemen ( a general of the Achaean League), a treatise on tactics and a history of the Numantine War. Polybius is not only the first Greek to tell about Rome but also predates all surviving historical texts written by Romans.
Polybius (200 BC-118 BC)