Polybius between Greece and Rome Once again, whatever the real Acarnanian speaker of ..actually said,
Polybius certainly had the freedom to select what to put in his own narrative,
perhaps even the freedom to invent appropriate words. It is surely significant
that at the moment of the first substantial Roman involvement in Greece, he
makes a speaker represent them as foreigners intent on enslaving Greece, di-
rectly comparable to the Persians, thosebarbaroiwhose defeat was the central
event in Greek history.
What I want to stress, however, is not the implicit reservations in Poly-
bius’ attitude to Rome; though nothing could be more false, in my view,
than the idea that, in explaining to the Greek world how and why Rome had
gained universal domination, he was also recommending, or even defend-
ing, Roman rule. What is important is the fact that Polybius’Historyreally is
the product of his earlier experience as a central figure in the self-governing
Achaean league of cities which occupied a large part of the Peloponnese. To
Polybius that part of the past which mattered, that past from which lessons
could be drawn, was the experience of the Greek city-states since the victory
over Xerxes. It was a continuous history, all of which offered lessons and ex-
amples that were relevant to the present. Polybius would have been surprised
to learn that something called the Hellenistic age had begun in ..,and
that he himself was a Hellenistic historian. He would surely have supposed
that he was simply a Greek one.