William Roger Paton (1857–1921) was an independent scholar educated at Oxford and based in Samos. F. W. Walbank was Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the British Academy. Christian Habicht is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Polybius found a brilliant subject for his history in the Roman
drive to supremacy in the Mediterranean. As an experienced Greek
politician who lived as a hostage among the elite in Rome from 167
to 159 BC, he was ideally positioned to write it. He had formidable
organizational powers, and he really did know what he was talking
about. Without him, our understanding of the whole period and of
the dynamics of Roman imperialism would be inconceivably
impoverished.
*Times Literary Supplement*
These are the first two volumes of a revised text and translation
of the Histories of Polybius. Polybius was the Greek historian who
wrote of the rise of Rome to Mediterranean power, and who is
usually ranked as one of the ancient world’s great historians. This
edition is based on that of W. R. Paton (1922), which has long
served scholars but has been in sore need of updating and
correction. This new version comes thanks to Frank W. Walbank
(1909–2008), the great Polybius scholar of the modern world, whose
monumental three-volume A Historical Commentary on Polybius
(1957–79) is the starting point for all modern studies of the
historian and the era he chronicled. While writing his commentary,
Walbank systematically corrected Paton’s edition in hundreds of
places, and these changes have now been incorporated by Christian
Habicht, himself one of the great historians of the Hellenistic
age. Habicht has provided a new introduction, bibliography, and
notes, and the result is a splendid, reliable, and up-to-date
edition of Polybius that will be accessible to students and
scholars alike. One looks forward eagerly to the remaining volumes
that are to appear over the next year.
*Choice*
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