The Rise of the Roman Empire

“Now in earlier times the world’s history had consisted, so to speak, of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of each being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole.”

One of Polybius’s main arguments is that Rome’s expansion contributed to global unification, marking a shift in human history. Rome’s imperialistic ambitions caused them to carry their culture and practices across land and sea. Polybius covers events that at first seem entirely separate from each other, eventually showing how these seemingly unrelated events came together.

“Just as Fortune has steered almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and forced them to converge upon one and the same goal, so it is the task of the historian to present to his readers under one synoptical view the process by which she has accomplished this general design.”

Polybius steers away from his historian predecessors, including Timaeus, whom he felt relied too heavily on myth and gossip in his accounts. As he explores The Balance of Fortune and Virtue and its relationship to Rome’s expansion, he argues that both play a role in the trajectory of history.

“Certainly the turn of events which befell the Medionians might have been expressly designed by Fortune to demonstrate her power to mankind in general; for overnight she had enabled them to inflict on their enemies the very fate which they believed the latter were about to inflict on them.”

In this passage, Polybius is describing an unexpected reversal in a battle. The Medionians seemed destined for defeat but then were miraculously saved. He uses the Medionians as an example of Fortune’s impact on outcomes and how it can sometimes overcome the influence of virtue (or lack thereof).