Polybius: works in Greek and English

The road of the text

Follow the text from Polybius's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Readers
Copies
Print and editions

c. 200 BCThe authorBorn at Megalopolis in Arcadia, about 200 BC (an older account says about 208)^3,4,5 Debated among scholars
about 18 years laterc. 182 BCThe authorCarries the urn of Philopoemen at his funeral (183 or 182 BC)^3,4,6
about 1 years later181 BCThe authorNamed an envoy to Egypt with his father, though under the legal age; the king dies and the embassy never sails^3,7
about 12 years laterc. 169 BCThe authorHipparch, cavalry commander, of the Achaean League (170/169 or 169/168)^3,4,8
about 2 years later167 BCThe authorOne of more than a thousand Achaeans sent to Italy; he is allowed to stay in Rome with the sons of Aemilius Paullus^3,4,9,10
about 17 years laterc. 150 BCThe authorThe surviving detainees are sent home (151 or 150 BC)^3,4,9 Debated among scholars
about 4 years later146 BCThe authorWith Scipio at the burning of Carthage; at Corinth, Strabo reports, when the Roman soldiers played dice on its paintings^13,14,15
about 1 years laterc. 145 BCThe authorSettles the laws and disputes of the Greek cities for the Romans, and is honoured with statues^3,16
about 30 years laterc. 118 BCThe authorDies at eighty-two, reportedly after a fall from his horse^4,19
about 60 years later54 BCReadersCicero begins On the Republic (54–51 BC), which recalls Scipio's talks in the presence of Polybius^37,38
about 1,000 years laterc. AD 947CopiesThe monk Ephraim copies Books 1–5 in the Vatican manuscript A (quite probably in 947)^42,43 Debated among scholars
about 3 years laterc. AD 950CopiesThe Constantinian Excerpts, a 53-volume anthology made for Constantine VII, preserve passages of the lost books^43,44
about 580 years later1530Print and editionsFirst printed Greek text of Books 1–5, edited by Obsopoeus at Hagenau⁴⁵
38 years later1568Print and editionsChristopher Watson's English translation, made from a Latin version^21,46
41 years later1609Print and editionsIsaac Casaubon's edition at Paris gathers the books and the excerpts⁴⁵
about 180 years later1787ReadersJohn Adams discusses Polybius in his Defence of the Constitutions^40,41
95 years later1882Print and editionsBüttner-Wobst's Teubner edition begins (1882–1904); it is the Greek text in the reader^4,47
7 years later1889Print and editionsEvelyn Shuckburgh's English translation, the one in the reader⁴⁷
68 years later1957Print and editionsF. W. Walbank's Historical Commentary begins (three volumes, 1957–79)⁴
53 years later2010Print and editionsThe revised Loeb edition begins (six volumes, 2010–12)^24,48,49

Life and work

Checked against sources · 6 October 2026

Polybius begins with a dare. Could anyone be “so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?” In his Greek: «οὐχ ὅλοις πεντήκοντα καὶ τρισὶν ἔτεσιν».¹ The fifty-three years run from the wars that began about 220 BC to “the fall of the Macedonian monarchy”, in 168.^2,3 He comes back to the same question in the last surviving chapter of his work, at the end of Book 39.³

A statesman's son

Debated among scholars Polybius was born at Megalopolis in Arcadia, in the Peloponnese, and lived from about 200 to about 118 BC, the dates modern reference works give.^4,5 The introduction to the first Loeb translation (1922) put his birth about 208.³

Megalopolis belonged to the Achaean League, a union of Greek cities, and his father Lycortas became its strategos, its commanding general.⁴ As a young man Polybius walked in the funeral of Philopoemen, one of the most eminent Achaean leaders of his generation: the urn, says Plutarch, “was borne by Polybius, the son of the Achaean general”.⁶ That was in 183 or 182 BC; the sources differ.^3,4 In 181 the League named him an envoy to Egypt with his father, although he was, in his own words, «νεώτερον ὄντα τῆς κατὰ τοὺς νόμους ἡλικίας», younger than the legal age (our translation).^3,7 In 170 or 169 he was elected hipparch, the League's cavalry commander, its second-highest office.^4,8

Hostage at Rome

After Rome crushed King Perseus of Macedon at Pydna in 168, every Achaean whom the politician Callicrates chose to accuse was sent to Italy: “They amounted to over a thousand men”.^3,9 Polybius was one of them, but luckier than the rest.^3,4 The sons of the Roman general Aemilius Paullus got leave for him to stay in Rome; their friendship, he says, began with a loan of books.¹⁰

One day the younger son, Scipio, “for he was only just eighteen”, blushed and asked why Polybius always talked to his elder brother. Polybius promised his help, and Scipio seized his hand: “Oh that I might see the day on which you would devote your first attention to me, and join your life with mine.”¹⁰ The boy became the general Scipio Aemilianus, and the two remained friends.⁴

The detainees waited for a trial that never came.³ In 151 or 150 BC, when three hundred or fewer were left, Rome let them go home.^3,4,9 The Roman statesman Cato mocked the long debate, as Plutarch tells it: “As though we had nothing else to do, we sit here the whole day debating whether some old Greek dotards should be buried by Italian or Achaean undertakers!” The Greek text in the reader prints Plutarch's words among the fragments of Polybius.^11,12

Carthage and Corinth

In 146 Polybius stood beside Scipio as Carthage burned.^3,4 Scipio turned, took his hand and said: «ὦ Πολύβιε», «καλὸν μέν, ἀλλʼ οὐκ οἶδʼ ὅπως ἐγὼ δέδια», “O Polybius, it is a grand thing, but, I know not how, I feel a terror and dread, lest some one should one day give the same order about my own native city.”¹³ The historian Appian adds that Scipio is said to have wept and quoted Homer on the fall of Troy, and that “Polybius wrote this down just as he heard it”.¹⁴

Did Scipio name Rome? The Greek says he did: «φασὶν οὐ φυλαξάμενον ὀνομάσαι τὴν πατρίδα σαφῶς», “they say that he named his country plainly, without guarding his words” (our translation). Horace White's Appian in the reader agrees (“he did not hesitate frankly to name his own country”), but Shuckburgh's Polybius reads it the other way: “he did not name Rome distinctly”.^13,14

The same year the Romans sacked Corinth.⁴ Polybius, Strabo reports, “says that he was present and saw paintings that had been flung to the ground and saw the soldiers playing dice on these”.¹⁵ Afterwards the Roman commissioners asked him to go round the Greek cities and settle their disputes under their new laws, and the cities honoured him in his life and after his death.¹⁶ He also spoke up for the statues of Philopoemen when a Roman wanted them removed, and they stayed.⁶

Statues and portraits of him stood at Megalopolis, Mantinea, Tegea, Olympia and elsewhere.³ At Megalopolis Pausanias read verses saying that “he roamed over every land and every sea”.¹⁷ At the sanctuary of the Mistress an inscription went further, «εἰ Πολυβίῳ τὰ πάντα ἐπείθετο»: “Greece would never have fallen at all, if she had obeyed Polybius in everything, and when she met disaster her only help came from him.”¹⁸

He also wrote a life of Philopoemen, a handbook on tactics and a history of Rome's war at Numantia in Spain, all lost.^3,4 A short book on long-lived men that goes under Lucian's name says he “was thrown from his horse, fell ill as a result of it, and died at eighty-two”.^4,19

How history should be written

Polybius set out to write the history of the whole world at once: “Just as Fortune made almost all the affairs of the world incline in one direction, and forced them to converge upon one and the same point”, so the historian must show the whole.²⁰ That Fortune, «ἡ τύχη», can mean plain chance or the goddess.^20,21

He is fierce about truth: «ἐξ ἱστορίας ἀναιρεθείσης τῆς ἀληθείας τὸ καταλειπόμενον αὐτῆς ἀνωφελὲς γίνεται διήγημα», “if you take truth from History what is left is but an idle unprofitable tale”.²² He calls his own kind of writing «ὁ τῆς πραγματικῆς ἱστορίας τρόπος», pragmatic history;²³ Christian Habicht, in the new Loeb, explains it as “political history or history of events”.²⁴

For him “the science of genuine history is threefold”: written records, knowledge of places, and experience of politics.²⁵ He even borrows the shape of Plato's saying about philosopher kings: “history will never be properly written, until either men of action undertake to write it”, or historians gain experience of affairs.²⁶ His chief target in Book 12 is the historian Timaeus, an attack Habicht judged spiteful and biased.^4,26

He practised what he preached. To tell Hannibal's march he questioned eyewitnesses and had “gone over the Alpine pass myself, in order to inform myself of the truth and see with my own eyes”.²⁷ He faced the dangers of “my travels in Libya, Iberia, and Gaul”.²⁸ Of the last years of his story he says: “I was not only an eye-witness, but in some cases one of the actors, and in others the chief director.”²⁹

Debated among scholars The code square that now bears his name comes from his chapter on fire signals, where the alphabet is split into five groups of five letters (the last one letter short), each written on its own tablet.^4,30 He did not claim it as his own: the method was “hit upon by Cleoxenus and Democlitus, and further elaborated by myself”.³⁰

The mixed constitution

In Book 6 he stops the story to explain why Rome won. Most thinkers list “three kinds of constitutions, which they designate kingship, aristocracy, democracy”, but “we must regard as the best constitution that which partakes of all these three elements”.³¹ Each good form has a bad twin, “despotism, oligarchy and mob-rule” («ὀχλοκρατίαν»), and each in turn decays and is overthrown.³² «αὕτη πολιτειῶν ἀνακύκλωσις»: “This is the regular cycle of constitutional revolutions”; his word, anacyclosis, is still used for the theory.^4,33 Even Rome, he warns, “to natural causes will owe its decay”.³³

For now, though, Rome balanced its three powers so well that “no one could say for certain, not even a native, whether the constitution as a whole were an aristocracy or democracy or despotism”: the consuls look like kings, the Senate like an aristocracy, the people like a democracy.³⁴ This picture of a mixed constitution, each part checking the others, became the most influential part of his work.⁴

Readers

Not every reader enjoyed him. Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed him among historians whose books are «οἵας οὐδεὶς ὑπομένει μέχρι κορωνίδος διελθεῖν», “such as no one has the patience to read through to the end” (our translation).³⁵ Yet Strabo and Athenaeus quote him at length, and Diodorus, Livy, Plutarch and Arrian drew on him.⁴ Livy calls him haudquaquam spernendus auctor, “by no means a writer to be despised” (our translation).³⁶

In Cicero's On the Republic (54–51 BC), Scipio is reminded of the talks on the best state he used to hold coram Polybio, in the presence of Polybius, and later follows “our Polybius, than whom no one was more careful in working out dates” (our translation).^37,38,39 In 1787 John Adams gave him two letters of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, though he warned that “we may see cause to differ widely from the judgment of Polybius”.^40,41

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Forty books, five whole. Polybius himself speaks of his «βύβλους τετταράκοντα», his forty books.⁵⁰ Only the first five survive complete. Of the rest we have sections and fragments, some long, gathered from Byzantine selections of excerpts.^3,21

Manuscript A. The oldest copy of Books 1–5 is A, Vaticanus Graecus 124, written by a monk called Ephraim in the tenth century. It is quite probably of AD 947, but not certainly: Ephraim's closing note gives the day of the month and the year of the tax cycle, not the year itself.⁴² The 1922 Loeb introduction still dated it to the eleventh century.³ J. M. Moore, who collated the main manuscripts in full, showed that the other old copies of Books 1–5 do not descend from A but from a lost twin of it: he found nearly 300 errors in A that the other branch does not share.⁴³

The Old Excerpts. A second Byzantine selection, the Excerpta Antiqua, keeps long passages of Books 1–18. Its oldest manuscript is F, Vaticanus Urbinas Graecus 102, of the tenth or eleventh century; Moore thought the selection was made in the ninth or tenth century. Nothing in it comes from Book 17, which was probably already lost.⁴³

The Constantinian Excerpts. The emperor Constantine VII (945–959) commissioned an anthology of 53 volumes, in which passages of at least 25 historians were sorted by subject. Only four volumes survive: On Embassies, On Ambushes, On Virtues and Vices (whose original tenth-century book is at Tours, the Codex Peirescianus) and On Sayings (whose original is a palimpsest in the Vatican, Graecus 73, wiped and written over in the fourteenth century). Some of the Polybius they keep is found nowhere else.^43,44

Quotations. Other writers fill more gaps. Strabo and Athenaeus quote him at length.⁴ Some famous scenes, like Scipio's tears at Carthage or the paintings at Corinth, are known from Appian's and Strabo's retellings, and the Greek text in the reader prints those retellings among the fragments, at 38.22 and 39.2.^13,14,15

Print. Niccolò Perotti had translated Books 1–5 into Latin. Part of Book 6 was printed at Venice in 1529, edited by Janus Lascaris. The first Greek edition of Books 1–5, by Vincentius Obsopoeus, appeared at Hagenau in 1530 with Perotti's Latin. The Old Excerpts were printed at Basel in 1549, the excerpts On Embassies by Fulvio Orsini at Antwerp in 1582, and Isaac Casaubon brought it all together at Paris in 1609.⁴⁵ The first English Polybius, by Christopher Watson (London, 1568), was made from Perotti's Latin.^21,46 The standard Greek text is still Theodor Büttner-Wobst's for the Teubner series (1882–1904), itself a reworking of Ludwig Dindorf's.^4,24,48

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

A gap at the very start. Manuscript A, the oldest copy of Books 1–5, has two gaps on facing pages, in the preface at 1.2.7–8 and 1.3.3, and the other manuscripts have the same gaps.⁴² So the editors must rebuild the sentence about Rome's empire. The reader's Greek reads «ἀνυπόστατον μὲν τοῖς ὑπάρχουσι πᾶσιν, ἀνυπέρβλητον δὲ καὶ τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις».²³ W. R. Paton's Loeb of 1922 put part of its English here in square brackets, as guesses. The revised Loeb of 2010 translates a new, still partly hypothetical, reconstruction: “for those living irresistible, for those to come insurpassable”.²⁴

Which book is which? Most of the later books are jigsaws of excerpts, and editors number them differently.⁴⁸ In the reader you can see it at once. The Greek follows Büttner-Wobst, but Shuckburgh's English follows a different numbering: Scipio's talk with Polybius is 31.23–24 in the Greek and 32.9–10 in the English, and Shuckburgh's Book 39 includes what Dindorf printed as Book 40.^10,47 The reader has no Book 17 at all: the Byzantine excerpts keep nothing from it, though Athenaeus quotes two passages that he says come from it.^43,47 Of Book 37 the Greek keeps a single sentence, quoted for a place name, «Πολύβιος τριακοστῷ ἑβδόμῳ», Polybius in the thirty-seventh book (our translation).^48,51 And the 1922 Loeb introduction cites the last chapter as 40.14, while the Loeb's own text, like the reader, numbers it 39.8.³

In what order? Even inside a book the order of fragments is a guess. Walbank, in his commentary, proposed reordering the fragments of Book 29 about the battle of Pydna; the revised Loeb did not follow him.⁴⁸

Golden shields? King Antiochus IV once held a great festival procession at Daphne, near Antioch. The reader's Greek lists «Μακεδόνες δισμύριοι καὶ χαλκάσπιδες πεντακισχίλιοι, ἄλλοι δὲ ἀργυράσπιδες»: twenty thousand Macedonians, five thousand with bronze shields, the rest with silver.^52,53 Paton's translation adds ten thousand with golden shields, following a conjecture by the scholar Kaibel. Walbank doubted it in his commentary but later changed his mind, and the revised Loeb kept it; its reviewer still thought the grounds doubtful.^48,53

A god's name. In 2.39 three Greek cities of southern Italy built a common temple «Διὸς Ὁμαρίου», of Zeus Homarios. Shuckburgh translates “Zeus Homorios”, and his note in the reader explains that the manuscripts vary between the two spellings.⁵⁴

Books to read it in

T. Büttner-Wobst, Polybii Historiae (Leipzig, Teubner, 1882–1904).^4,47 The Greek text in the reader is Perseus's copy of volumes 1–4 of this edition.
E. S. Shuckburgh, The Histories of Polybius, 2 vols (London and New York, Macmillan, 1889).⁴⁷ The English translation in the reader; it numbers the later fragments differently.
W. R. Paton, Polybius: The Histories, 6 vols (Loeb Classical Library, 1922–27).^3,4 Free to read on LacusCurtius.
W. R. Paton, revised by F. W. Walbank and C. Habicht, Polybius: The Histories, 6 vols (Loeb Classical Library 128, 137, 138, 159, 160, 161; Harvard University Press, 2010–12); volume 6 edited and translated with S. D. Olson.^21,24,48,49 Greek and English, with new notes, and 236 fragments from unknown books.
F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, 3 vols (Oxford, 1957, 1967, 1979).^4,48 A review of 2013 calls it still essential.
J. M. Moore, The Manuscript Tradition of Polybius (Cambridge, 1965).^3,43 The study of the manuscripts.
R. Waterfield, Polybius: The Histories (Oxford World's Classics, 2010); I. Scott-Kilvert and F. W. Walbank, The Rise of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics, 1979).²¹ Modern English translations.

Where this comes from

Sources (54)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 6 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

Polybius

The work