Martial put me much in mind of Archilochus - and Titus Livius was positively
Polybius and none other."
Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at
Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who, under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been quite unworthy of his English origin, and 'not to have acted up to his name' in his government of the Roman people.
While the thickness of Champion's hermeneutic lens is occasionally refractive (his textual analysis reflecting his hermeneutic grid), most often it proves a powerful tool for macro- and micro-textual analysis of the complexities of
Polybius's narrative.
This was presumably because in writing them Bruni had stayed closer than was acceptable, by modern standards, to his sources, respectively Plutarch,
Polybius, and Procopius.
When the Greek historian
Polybius lived in Rome in the mid-second century BC, he found structures very similar to those he was accustomed to at home and could apply his Greek theories to Roman political life, even if not always with convincing results.
Its use in Lord's essay is most noteworthy for there it justifies--in the discussion of the naturalness of the city--leaving behind the famous Politics 1.2 and concentrating instead on scattered hints about thumos and on the writings of Plato and
Polybius. The strangeness of this will strike any reader, and though Lord reaches some intriguing conclusions as a result, his procedure really needs more sustained defense than it gets.
Baronowski explores the complex and ambivalent views of Achaean historian
Polybius (200-120 BC) about Roman imperialism.
For instance, she notes that in the case of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, a passage by
Polybius, a nearly contemporary source, seems to prove moralizing manipulation in Livy's account; Livy defends him from the charge that he removed art from temples, where
Polybius' passage has him remove statues of the gods (208-209).
We have Latin historians, particularly Livy, who wrote patriotic history, and Greek writers such as
Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Strabo.