Polybius and Rome's Eastern Policy

Any discussion of the policy of the Roman Senate towards the Hellenistic world at the end of the third century B.C. must inevitably take account of the work of two men who wrote their most important books around this topic. One is, of course, Polybius, the other Maurice Holleaux. Holleaux's book on Rome, Greece and the Hellenistic monarchies appeared in 1921; but it came as the culmination of several studies on this subject, which had been exercising his attention particularly since 1913. Today, then, we stand virtually at the fiftieth anniversary of Holleaux's thesis, and we can appropriately consider how far it has stood the test of time. However, that is not my main purpose in this paper, which will be concerned much more with what Polybius has to say on the subject. As everyone knows, it is the evidence of Polybius that stands behind Holleaux's remarkable reconstruction of Roman policy; and Holleaux's problem is quite central to Polybius' interests—indeed it is very close to, though not identical with, his main theme. ‘Who,’ he asks, ‘is so worthless and so indolent as not to want to know by what means and under what constitutional system the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history?’ It is perhaps not unfair to judge a historian by the degree of success he attains in tackling his main theme. If that seems a reasonable proposition, we may ask ourselves: Does Polybius in fact offer a satisfactory answer to the question he has raised

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