ABSTRACT
P OLYBIUS was born about 200 B.c. at Megalopolis in Arcadia, a leading city of the Achaean League. He died some eighty years later. His life thus covered the period when the Romans; having subdued Hannibal, were extending their power eastwards and reducing to subjection Greece, Macedonia and Asia Minor. He belonged, like Plato, to a well-to-do family with strong political connections; but for him history, not philosophy, was the proper study for a future ruler. Like his father, Polybius played a big part in the affairs of the Achaean League and he was in some parts of his work writing history in which he himself had acted -a fact of which he is proudly conscious. After their victories of r68 B.C. the Romans removed a thousand of the leading men from Greece to Rome and kept them there for nearly seventeen years. Polybius was inevitably one of these, but he fared better than most. He made friends with Scipio Aemilianus, then a mere boy, and, as he watched his career, came to see in him the perfect ideal of a Roman. Through constant intercourse with leading Romans he learned much of their way of life and thought. He was thus doubly well equipped to write the history which he then planned.
