Polybius between Greece and Rome Peloponnese only falls short of being a single city in the fact of its inhabitants
not being enclosed by one wall’’ (, , –).
As has often been noted, Polybius discusses Rome also in terms of a nuclear
city-state and did not devote any attention, so far as we know from the sur-
viving text, to what moderns sometimes call the ‘‘Italian confederation.’’ But
in that he was in fact right, for the structure of Roman Italy was that of a set
of alliances between Rome and individual city-states and peoples, and was no
sort of league of confederation like the Achaean league.^13 Where he might
have extended the range of political analysis beyond that inherited from Plato
and Aristotle was in relation to monarchy. For while the resilience of Rome
in the face of three major defeats by Hannibal in the years –..rightly
impressed him, he might well have been struck, by comparison, by the fra-
gility of the great Hellenistic kingdoms, which would admit defeat in a war
after the loss of a single battle, as Macedon did in and ..,ortwo
battles, as with those of and ..by which the Romans drove Anti-
ochus III first out of Greece and then out of Asia Minor.
Perhaps we should not blame Polybius for this oversight, however, for
even the most brilliant of modern accounts, say by Elias Bickermann or
Claire Préaux,^14 have hardly succeeded in explaining what a Hellenistic mon-
archy was really like as a system, or how it held together at all. Confronted
with monarchies, Polybius turns either to explanations in terms of personal
character or to observations on the instability of human fortune. In both
approaches, once again, the framework is supplied by the earlier history of
Greece. For instance, when he wants to set in context the fact that Philip V
of Macedon in ..allowed his army to destroy colonnades and statues
in the Aetolian city of Thermon, he reflects on the models which the king
should have followed: Philip II’s clemency to the Athenians after the battle of
Chaeronea in ..; Alexander’s care not to destroy the temples of Thebes
in Boeotia in .., or his preservation of temples in the Persian Empire
(, ). But Philip V, he says, was either too young or had the wrong advisers,
and lost the chance of gaining the good reputation which mercy would have
won him (, –). Later Polybius represents Philip V, now much older and
perhaps wiser, telling his sons to read tragedies, myths, and histories, and to
think of the disastrous effects of strife between brothers; or, alternatively,
to think of the kings of Sparta, whose success had been gained by mutual
. See F. Millar (n. ).
. E. J. Bickermann,InstitutionsdesSéleucides(); C. Préaux,LemondehellénistiqueI–II
(), –.