![]() ![]() He was also still writing his Histories, which ended up spreading over forty books, mainly focusing on the years 220 to 167 BCE, with a brief flashback to the First Punic War and an epilogue to bring the story down to 146 BCE. But Polybius was soon back with his Roman associates, travelling with the army to Carthage and acting as an intermediary in the negotiations that followed the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE. Only 300 were still alive, and one outspoken Roman is supposed to have complained about the senate wasting its time ‘debating whether some elderly Greeks should be buried by undertakers here or in Greece’. The surviving hostages were released around 150 BCE. ‘Never come back from the Forum,’ he is supposed to have urged, ‘until you have made at least one new friend.’ Snatches of Polybius’ advice to Aemilianus were still being quoted, or misquoted, more than two hundred years later. He quickly fell in with Aemilianus (they apparently met over the loan of some books) and his family and was allowed to stay in Rome, where he became the young man’s de facto tutor and as close as ‘father to son’. ![]() Polybius, who already had a reputation as a writer, was luckier. Born into the political aristocracy of a town in the Peloponnese, he was in his thirties in 168 BCE, when Aemilius Paullus defeated King Perseus, and he found himself one of 1,000 Greek detainees taken to Rome as part of the political purge, or precautionary measures, that followed. Most of them were placed under a light-touch regime of house arrest and scattered among the towns of Italy. Polybius, who knew Rome as both an enemy and a friend, was uniquely well placed to reflect on the rise of the city and on its institutions.
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