Polybius

c. 200–118 BCE

Polybius of Megalopolis, a statesman of the Achaean League, was taken to Rome as a hostage in 167 and became the friend of Scipio Aemilianus, at whose side he watched Carthage burn. His Histories, in forty books of which five survive whole and the rest in extracts, explain how in fifty-three years Rome came to rule the inhabited world: the wars with Carthage and the Hellenistic kings, the Roman constitution and army, and the method of writing history itself.