This well-crafted and attractive volume is a fitting tribute to the man Peter Derow once called noster Polybius, Frank W. Walbank. The book emerges from a 2007 conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first volume of Walbank's magisterial Historical Commentary on Polybius. It is a wide-ranging, heterogeneous collection of essays, part memoir, part biography and part scholarly homage.
The first and last two chapters are biographical in nature. The first, by the editors, focuses on a series of Walbank's minor works from the 1930s–1940s, which show that in this period Walbank commonly drew lessons for the present from the study of the past. J. Henderson's second chapter, using Walbank's private papers and memoirs, documents his 35-year ordeal composing and publishing the Commentary. Walbank's daughter Mitzi chronicles this same period in the book's final chapter. Her youthful hostility towards Polybius, who preoccupied Walbank to the exclusion of almost all else, is perhaps understandable.
For his intellectual progeny, on the other hand, Walbank was and remains an inspiration. Several of the papers gathered here treat the historiographical relationships between Polybius and his fellow historians. J. Marincola demonstrates that Polybius' criticism of Phylarchus for writing ‘tragic’ history is aimed not at Phylarchus' emotionalism, style or rhetorical excesses, but the ‘falsehood, exaggeration, and invention’ (p. 78) that result from these. A. Meadows argues that despite Polybius' claim that the formal beginning of his Histories, the 140th Olympiad, picks up where Aratus' Memoirs leave off (Polyb. 1.3.1–2), he continued to follow Aratus' ‘unpublished journals’ (pp. 111, 113) well into Book 4. J. Briscoe recapitulates the evidence for Livy's apparent misunderstandings of his Polybian source material. In the absence of much of Polybius' text, however, some of this must remain speculative. E. Gruen explores the historiographical debt of Josephus to Polybius. H.-U. Wiemer demonstrates that Polybius' famous judgement on the Rhodian historian Zeno – that he distorted the truth out of patriotic duty, but was otherwise an excellent eyewitness authority (16.14–20) – was largely justified.
The remainder of the papers are on topics as diverse as the content of Polybius' Histories. H. Beck delivers the first of three chapters on the prokataskeuē, Polybius' two-book ‘introduction’ or ‘preparation’ to the starting-point of his Histories proper, 220 b.c. Although such introductions typically consisted of uncontroversial matters, Polybius deliberately chose to begin with a ‘historiographical big bang’ (p. 131) – the Roman crossing to Sicily in 264 b.c. – in order to cement his version of events as the standard account. In the following chapter, C. Champion argues that the reason Polybius' account of the outbreak of the First Punic War is so vague about crucial and controversial details is because he was attempting to provide a narrative that was simultaneously pro-Roman and subtly anti-Roman, a strategy designed ‘to give voice to anti-Roman sentiments among Polybius’ Greek readership' (p. 147) without risking displeasing his Roman captors. G. concentrates on the Mercenary War narrative in the prokataskeuē (1.65–88), and attempts to demonstrate the influence of Xenephon's Anabasis – also a mercenary war narrative – on Polybius' account.
Two papers deal with Philip V of Macedon: B. McGing on his youth and B. Dreyer on his tragic end. McGing argues that the young Philip defies Polybius' usual typology of youthful rashness, inexperience, ineffectiveness and incompetence. In Philip's case, ‘the characteristic set of youthful failings … leads, or misleads, the actors in the story to underestimate’ the king (p. 187). Philip thus appears ‘as a dynamic leader and general, fast-moving, brave, and militarily successful, creating high hopes for the future’ (p. 191). Dreyer argues that despite Polybius' aversion to ‘tragic’ history, he followed an ‘over-dramatizing’ Macedonian court source on Philip's last days for its eyewitness quality, and because its conclusions were congenial to Polybius' own view of Philip as having a ‘morally conditioned “madness”’ and being ‘weak and inconsistent in his final actions shortly before his death’ (p. 210).
Two essays deal with Polybius' sixth book and its (perceived) omissions and errors. A. Erskine suggests that the text describes an ideal, a Platonic form of Rome, rather than precise reality. Everything in the text is designed to convey, especially to the Greeks, ‘a powerful impression of order and efficiency’ (p. 238) in order to show that everything the Romans do is for the good of the state, which is the main source of Roman strength and success. R. Seager, by contrast, trenchantly argues that Polybius simply tailors the facts to fit his theory of the Roman mixed constitution; more plausible is his secondary conclusion, that the historian's exclusive focus on ‘written rules’ was designed ‘to explain the Romans to the Greeks’ in terms they could understand (p. 254).
Each of the remaining chapters is rather sui generis. J. Thornton argues that Polybius' historiographical work is inseparable from and contaminated by his political purpose, as an active statesman, to secure the most favourable position for the Greeks with respect to Rome. This would seem to conflict with Polybius' careful distinction at 38.4 between his obligation as an active politician – to obscure the faults of the Greeks – and his mandate as a historian always to adhere to the truth, a passage Thornton dismisses as ‘only a rhetorical device’ (p. 216). C. Müller argues that Polyb. 20.4–7 on Boeotian decline into decadence between the Battle of Leuctra in 371 and the 190s is probably a later insertion and contains very little actual evidence of Boeotian decadence (and much to suggest the opposite). Müller's assertion that ‘the model [for decline in the passage] is that of Republican Rome’ (p. 277), however, lacks proof. M. Sommer's essay on Polybius' famous amicitia with Scipio Aemilianus convincingly demonstrates that Scipio highly valued his relationship with Polybius because of the large amount of ‘symbolic capital’ Greek learning could bring to the increasingly fierce competition for dignitas among Roman aristocrats in the mid-second century b.c. He goes badly wrong, however, when he asserts that asymmetric friendship was unknown in Rome (p. 315) and thus, despite what Polybius himself says, the historian ‘could not be an amicus of a Roman senator: he was a client’ (p. 316).Footnote 1 J.K. Davies demonstrates the value of Polybius' text as a source of raw data for economic history and for economic behaviour. Finally, J. Crawley Quinn argues that Polybius' symplokē is as much a political as a literary strategy, designed to ‘reinforce the inevitability and inviolability of the Roman empire’ (p. 345).
The quality of the essays is almost uniformly excellent – a fitting tribute to the volume's honorand. A great deal of erudition and hard work shines through in most of the papers, and it is nice to see citations of Walbank's Commentary in every one. The bibliography is extensive and the indexes are admirably detailed and precise. The editing and copy-editing is first-rate; all the essays are, so far as I could see, error- and typo-free.
