Recommendations from our site
“He is a good read. He’s quite analytical…Polybius is great on Hannibal, for example, because he went and interviewed people who had witnessed the Hannibalic invasion in the first and second decades of the 3rd century BCE. He’s writing 70 years later, but he did his boots-on-the-ground research and tried to trace Hannibal’s path across the Alps and things like that. So it’s really exciting history from someone who lived it and had access to many of the great players from that particular time. As well as Carthage, he also witnessed the fall of Corinth.” Read more...
“The ancient writer Polybius narrates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean within a 53-year period, an achievement that he calls unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes. For example, he sees Hannibal’s attack on Italy as caused by Hannibal’s ambitious moral character, which was incited to action by the unfair conditions imposed by Rome after the First Punic War. Now I don’t think that Polybius is right about this. “ Read more...
The best books on War and Foreign Policy
John David Lewis, Political Scientist
