The Hellenistic World and Rome
was outside Alexandria with his army. But at that moment there appeared
a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, who handed the king the text of a
decree of the Senate, telling him to end his war with Egypt. When the king
said that he would consult with his advisers, Laenas made the famous ges-
ture of drawing a circle in the sand round where the king was standing and
telling him to give his answer before stepping out of it. The king submit-
ted. The earliest narrative of this famous scene comes from Polybius himself
(, ). But the humiliation of the king made an immediate impact in the
eastern Mediterranean, as we know from a pseudo-prophecy in the book of
Daniel, written only a couple of years later (:): ‘‘For the ships of Kittim
will come, and he shall be grieved and return.’’^3
While the two Ptolemies were still in danger from Antiochus IV’s ad-
vance, the major league of Greek cities in the Peloponnese, the Achaean
league, had debated whether to send military assistance to them. Ambassa-
dors from the two Ptolemies, brothers who were formerly at odds but now
reconciled, had arrived asking for the dispatch of , foot soldiers and
cavalry. The infantry were to be commanded by Lycortas, Polybius’ father,
and the cavalry by Polybius himself, now probably in his thirties.^4 The pro-
posal, however, ran into difficulties; the pro-Roman party argued that all
their efforts should be directed to helping the Romans in their current war
against Perseus, the king of Macedon, in which a decisive battle was now
(rightly) expected. Polybius replied that in the previous year (..), when
he had been sent as ambassador to the Roman commander, he had been told
that the Romans needed no military assistance; in any case the Achaean league
could raise , or even , men if need be, so , going off to Alex-
andria would make no difference (, –).
In fact, the force was not sent to Alexandria. In the same year, ..,the
Romans defeated the Macedonians at Pydna, and the kingdom was dissolved.
In the following year large numbers of political figures in Greece, regarded
as anti-Roman, were taken off to exile in Rome and Italy: among these were
, from Achaea, including Polybius himself. They were to remain there
for seventeen years until their eventual release in ..
It was in Rome that Polybius conceived his enormously ambitious plan for
a universal history which would, first, show how events in all the different
parts of the civilized (i.e., Hellenised) world came together in a set of causal
interconnections, from ..onwards. It would therefore cover an un-
. On Daniel, see chapter in the present volume.
. For the dates of Polybius’s life, see M. Dubuisson, ‘‘Sur la mort de Polybe,’’REG
(): .