The Hellenistic World and Rome
concord and obedience to the laws and the ephors (the five annually elected
magistrates). There was also the contemporary example of the two brothers,
Eumenes II and Attalus II of Pergamon, whose concord had raised their king-
doms to greatness from small beginnings (, ).
When he comes to the great event with which I began, the Roman de-
feat of Perseus, king of Macedon, at Pydna in .., and to the end of the
Macedonian monarchy, Polybius turns back again to the fourth century and
quotes a marvellous passage from Demetrius of Phalerum, the philosopher
who was the effective ruler of Athens for a decade in the very early Helle-
nistic period, from to ..Demetrius in his workOn Fortunehad
reflected on the sudden end of the Persian Empire (, ).
Do you think, that fifty years ago either the Persians and the Persian
King or the Macedonians and the King of Macedon, if some god had
foretold the future to them, would ever have believed that at the time
when we live the very name of the Persians would have perished utterly
—the Persians who were masters of almost the whole world—and that
the Macedonians, whose name was formerly almost unknown, would
now be lords of it all? But nevertheless Fortune... now also... makes it
clear to all men, by endowing the Macedonians with the whole wealth
of Persia, that she has but lent them these blessings until she decides to
deal differently with them.A century and a half later, as Polybius goes on to reflect, this inspired
prophecy had come true, and Fortune had withdrawn from Macedon the
blessings which she had briefly given.
Such reflections were of course not unique to Polybius. By his time, they
had entered Roman culture as well. So, as he himself records (, , ), when
the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus witnessed the destruction of Carthage
in .., he recalled the fate of the empires of Assyria, Media, Persia, and
Macedon itself, and quoted two lines from the sixth book of Homer’sIliad
(–):
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.For Polybius the uses of history did not always need to be on so high a philo-
sophical level as that. Writing for a Greek audience, to record and explain
the rise of Rome to universal domination, he could on occasion use cross-
references to Greek history purely for dating purposes, that is, to anchor
events in earlier history in a context which was, or was supposed to be, famil-