The Histories, Book VI

Summary

Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution. The book survives only in excerpts made by later Byzantine compilers, so the text breaks off in places; the library text is Evelyn S. Shuckburgh's 1889 translation of what remains, with his sidenotes and section numbers. Polybius begins with a theory of political change. The usual list of three good constitutions, kingship, aristocracy and democracy, is incomplete, because each has a degenerate twin: tyranny, oligarchy and mob-rule. After some catastrophe such as flood or pestilence, scattered survivors herd together under the strongest man. As they come to approve gratitude and condemn ingratitude, the notions of duty and justice arise, and rule by force becomes kingship. Hereditary kings grow luxurious and turn tyrant; the noblest men overthrow them and govern as an aristocracy; their sons turn it into oligarchy; the people rise and set up democracy; and when later generations forget the value of equality and freedom, demagogues and bribery bring violence until a master appears again. Later writers named this cycle anacyclosis. The only escape is a mixture. Lycurgus gave Sparta kings, a council of elders and the people, each checking the others, and Rome reached a similar balance through long struggle. Polybius describes the consuls, who command armies and seem like kings; the Senate, which controls the treasury, foreign embassies and serious crimes in Italy; and the people, who alone confer office, judge capital cases, pass laws and decide peace or war. Each part needs the others, so that when one grows arrogant the rest restrain it. A long, practical account of the Roman army follows: the annual levy, the four classes of legionaries and their arms, the election of centurions, the plan of the camp, the watchword and night watches, the punishment of the fustuarium, decimation, and the crowns and gifts given for courage. Polybius then compares Rome with Athens, Thebes, Crete, Sparta and Carthage, setting aside Plato's ideal republic as a statue among living men. Rome surpasses Carthage because it fights with citizen soldiers, punishes bribery with death, and keeps faith by religious awe. He describes the aristocratic funeral, with its speech from the Rostra and its procession of ancestral masks, and tells of Horatius Cocles holding the bridge. The book closes by predicting that prosperity will one day corrupt Rome into mob-rule under the fair name of liberty, and with the Senate's refusal to ransom the prisoners Hannibal took at Cannae.

Plot or Argument

• Chs. 1–3: why pause at Cannae

  Polybius explains that his history was designed to show how and under what constitution Rome conquered nearly the whole world in less than fifty-three years. He chooses the aftermath of Cannae (216 BC) as the place to stop, since a constitution is best tested, like a man, in adversity. Greek republics are easy to judge; the Roman constitution is complex and needs careful study.

• Chs. 3–9: the six forms and their natural cycle

  Kingship, aristocracy and democracy each have a corrupt counterpart. Polybius distinguishes true kingship (accepted willingly and ruling by reason) from despotism, and true democracy (where reverence for the gods, care of parents, respect for elders and obedience to law are habitual) from the rule of the crowd. He then tells the conjectural history of society after a catastrophe: herd leadership, the birth of the ideas of duty and honour from gratitude and ingratitude, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and mob-rule, ending in a new despot.

• Ch. 10: Lycurgus and the mixed constitution

  Every simple constitution carries its own decay, as rust breeds in iron and worms in timber. Lycurgus foresaw this and combined royal, aristocratic and popular elements at Sparta so that each power was checked by the others and the state stayed steady like a ship sailing close to the wind. Rome arrived at the same result not by reasoning but through many struggles and reforms learned in disaster.

• Chs. 11–18: consuls, Senate and people

  Polybius describes the Roman constitution at the time of Cannae. The consuls direct administration and have almost absolute power in war; the Senate controls the treasury, public works contracts, crimes such as treason and poisoning in Italy, and relations with foreign states; the people confer offices, try capital cases, pass and repeal laws and decide on war and treaties. He then shows how each depends on the others: the consul needs the Senate for supplies and the people to ratify treaties and to hear his account; the Senate needs the people and fears the tribunes' veto; the people depend on the Senate for contracts and judges. The result is a union strong in danger and self-correcting in prosperity.

• Chs. 19–42: the Roman army

  A detailed manual of the army: the election of military tribunes, the levy, the oath, the division into velites, hastati, principes and triarii with their arms, centurions, cavalry and allied contingents; the layout of the camp with the consul's tent, streets and ramparts; the watchword passed on a tablet, the night watches and visiting rounds; the fustuarium for sleeping on watch, theft or false witness; decimation for units that flee; and the spears, cups and crowns given for voluntary courage and for saving a citizen's life. Pay, rations and the order of march complete the account.

• Chs. 43–50: other constitutions compared

  Athens and Thebes flourished briefly through great leaders and lacked stable institutions; the Athenian people are a ship without a commander. Crete, often praised alongside Sparta, is its opposite in land, money and offices, and is rejected for its avarice. Plato's Republic is excluded as an untested ideal. Sparta under Lycurgus was perfectly designed for safety and freedom at home but not for wider rule, which forced it to seek Persian money; Rome was built to acquire power.

• Chs. 51–56: Rome and Carthage, and Roman customs

  Carthage once had a balanced constitution like Rome's, but by the Hannibalic war the multitude dominated there while the Senate led at Rome. Carthage relied on mercenaries and naval skill, Rome on citizen levies and courage. Polybius then describes the noble funeral, with the eulogy from the Rostra and the ancestral masks worn by living men, tells the story of Horatius Cocles, contrasts Roman and Carthaginian attitudes to gain and bribery, and praises Roman religious scruple as what keeps oaths and public money safe.

• Chs. 57–58: the future decay of Rome and the Cannae prisoners

  All things decay. A state that has escaped great dangers and reached unchallenged power will grow extravagant and ambitious, and the people, flattered and cheated, will demand everything for themselves; the constitution will then be called liberty or democracy but become mob-rule. As a final specimen of Roman firmness, Polybius tells how the Senate after Cannae refused to ransom the eight thousand prisoners Hannibal offered to release, and sent back in chains the envoy who had tried to evade his oath.

Characters

• Lycurgus, lawgiver

  Legendary founder of the Spartan constitution, praised for combining royal, aristocratic and popular powers by foresight rather than by trial and error.

• Plato, philosopher cited

  Credited with a more exact account of political change than Polybius gives, while his Republic is excluded from comparison as an untried ideal.

• Horatius Cocles, Roman exemplar

  The legendary defender who held the bridge over the Tiber while it was cut down behind him, told in ch. 55 as an instance of Roman devotion to country.

• Hannibal, Carthaginian general

  Victor at Cannae, whose offer to ransom eight thousand Roman prisoners the Senate refuses in the closing chapter.

• Epaminondas and Pelopidas, Theban leaders

  Cited in ch. 43 as men whose personal ability, not their city's constitution, made Thebes great for a short time.

• Themistocles, Athenian statesman

  Named in ch. 44 as marking the high point of an Athenian constitution that soon declined.

• Ephorus, historian criticized

  Greek historian whom Polybius faults for describing the Cretan and Spartan constitutions in nearly identical words.

Lessons

• Every simple government carries the seed of its own corruption

  Polybius argues that kingship slides into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy and democracy into mob-rule, and that the decay comes from within, as rust comes to iron. The change is driven by the second and third generations, who inherit power or freedom without having suffered for it.

  • Why does Polybius put the blame for decay on the sons and grandsons of founders rather than on the founders themselves?
  • What part do luxury, bribery and the love of office play at each stage of the cycle in chs. 7–9?
  • Is Polybius's cycle a law of nature, as he claims, or a pattern drawn from Greek history?

• Mixed powers check one another

  The remedy for the cycle is a constitution in which royal, aristocratic and popular elements share power so that none can dominate. Polybius's description of how consuls, Senate and people depend on one another is one of the earliest detailed accounts of checks and balances.

  • List one way in which each of the three Roman powers can obstruct the other two.
  • Why does Polybius say that the mixed constitution is strongest both in danger and in prosperity?
  • Lycurgus designed his constitution by reason, while the Romans reached theirs through disasters. Which kind of constitution should we expect to last longer?

• Honour and shame as public institutions

  Polybius notices that Rome trains courage through visible honours: the funeral speech, the ancestral masks, crowns for scaling walls and saving citizens, and spoils hung in the house. Punishments for cowardice are equally public. A people's customs, not only its laws, form its citizens.

  • Why does Polybius think the funeral procession of masks would move a young Roman more than any argument?
  • How do the rewards in ch. 39 distinguish voluntary courage from courage in a set battle?
  • What modern equivalents of public honour and public shame can you think of, and do they work the same way?

• Faith kept in small things

  Polybius contrasts Greek officials who cannot be trusted with a single talent despite clerks and seals with Roman magistrates who handle large sums and keep their oath. He attributes the difference to religious awe and to the shame attached to bribery. The Senate's treatment of the envoy who tried to slip out of his oath shows the same strictness.

  • Why does the Senate send back the one envoy who returned to Hannibal's camp on a pretext?
  • Polybius treats religion chiefly as a restraint on the multitude. What does this view leave out?
  • Can a state rely on checking-clerks and seals alone, without honest officials?

Context

Polybius wrote as a Greek who had watched Rome defeat Macedon and dissolve the independence of the Greek leagues. Detained in Rome from 167 BC, he gained access to senators, records and veterans through the household of Aemilius Paullus and Scipio Aemilianus, and set out to explain Roman power to Greek readers. Book VI draws on the Greek tradition of constitutional theory, from Plato's account of the decline of regimes in the Republic and Laws to Aristotle's six forms of government in the Politics, and applies it to a living state.

Composition

The Histories were composed over many years after 167 BC and later extended to cover events through 146 BC. Book VI stood after the account of Cannae in Book III and the parallel events of Books IV–V. Only Books I–V survive complete; Book VI is known from excerpts preserved in Byzantine manuscripts, which is why the text has gaps marked by asterisks. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh's two-volume English translation was published by Macmillan in London in 1889.

Reception

Cicero drew on Polybius's mixed constitution in his dialogue On the Republic. In the Renaissance Machiavelli adapted the cycle of governments in the second chapter of his Discourses on Livy, and later writers on mixed government, among them Montesquieu, read Book VI closely. In America John Adams devoted two chapters of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787) to Polybius, and the language of balanced and checking powers in the founding era owes much to this book.

Comparisons

• machiavelli-discourses-on-livy

  Discourses I.2 retells Polybius's cycle of six constitutions almost point by point and agrees that Rome's mixture of consuls, Senate and tribunes made it durable, while Machiavelli adds that the quarrels between plebs and Senate were a cause of Roman liberty.

• cicero-republic-and-laws

  Cicero, who had read Polybius, makes Scipio Aemilianus (Polybius's own friend) the speaker who praises a blend of kingship, aristocracy and democracy as the best form, and places the Roman republic at the height of that balance.

• politics

  Aristotle's six constitutions, three correct and three deviant, supply the frame of Polybius's classification; Polybius turns Aristotle's static list into a cycle in time.

• the-spirit-of-the-laws

  Montesquieu's Book XI argues that power must be a check to power and finds liberty in a separation of powers; Polybius had described consuls, Senate and people restraining one another nineteen centuries earlier.

• the-federalist-papers

  Publius builds the American constitution on mutual checks among branches; reading Polybius chs. 15–18 beside Federalist 51 shows how the classical mixed constitution of orders became a balance of offices in a republic without kings or nobles.

• the-history-of-the-peloponnesian-war

  Thucydides' accounts of Athenian assemblies swayed by fear and confidence are the kind of history behind Polybius's image of the Athenian people as a ship without a commander.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The sidenotes in chs. 4–9 that trace each stage of the cycle, and the moment in ch. 6 where gratitude and ingratitude give rise to the idea of duty.
• The rust-and-iron image in ch. 10 and the ship sailing close to the wind, two pictures of decay and balance.
• Chs. 15–17, where each of the three Roman powers is shown needing the other two.
• The funeral of masks in ch. 53 and Horatius Cocles in ch. 55, where Polybius moves from institutions to customs.
• The closing prediction in ch. 57 and the Senate's answer to Hannibal in ch. 58.

Key terms and names

Anacyclosis

The later Greek name for Polybius's cycle of constitutions, in which kingship, aristocracy and democracy each decay into a corrupt form and give way to the next.

Mixed constitution

A government combining royal, aristocratic and popular elements so that each checks the others; Polybius finds it in Lycurgus's Sparta and in Rome.

Ochlocracy (mob-rule)

The corrupt form of democracy in Polybius's scheme, where the crowd, used to bribes and led by an ambitious man, rules by violence.

Consuls

The two annual chief magistrates of Rome, who command armies and direct administration, and so appear to Polybius as the royal element.

Tribunes of the people

Officers bound to the people's wishes whose veto, ch. 16 notes, can stop the Senate from passing decrees or even meeting.

Fustuarium

The Roman military punishment in ch. 37 in which a condemned soldier is beaten to death by his comrades with cudgels and stones.

Imagines

The lifelike masks of distinguished ancestors kept in Roman noble houses and worn in funeral processions, described in ch. 53.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the six forms of government in ch. 4, and in what order does Polybius say they follow one another?
2. Comprehension According to chs. 12–14, what powers belong to the consuls, the Senate and the people?
3. Comprehension Why does the Senate refuse to ransom the prisoners taken at Cannae, and what does it do with the tenth envoy?
4. Interpretation In ch. 6 Polybius says that the idea of duty arises when people see ingratitude and imagine themselves in the injured person's place. What does this suggest about the source of justice?
5. Interpretation Why does Polybius think Sparta's constitution was better for safety but Rome's better for empire?
6. Interpretation In ch. 56 Polybius praises Roman religion mainly for its usefulness in restraining the crowd. How does that explanation fit with his account of honest Roman magistrates?
7. Big Question Can any constitution escape decay, or can good institutions only slow it down?
8. Big Question Is a free people kept free more by its laws or by its customs of honour and shame?

Faith Connections

• Judges 21:25 (Scripture)

  The refrain that there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes describes the kind of disorder Polybius places at the end of his cycle, when mob-rule gives way to a new master.

• 1 Samuel 8 (Scripture)

  Samuel warns Israel that a king will take their sons, fields and servants, the same drift from kingship to tyranny that Polybius traces in ch. 7, though Scripture sets the request for a king within Israel's relation to God.

• Augustine, City of God II.21 (Great Conversation)

  Augustine takes up Cicero's (and through him Polybius's) praise of the balanced Roman commonwealth and asks whether Rome was ever a true commonwealth, since true justice requires the worship of the true God.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 1 (Great Conversation)

  Aquinas describes the best government as a mixture of kingship, aristocracy and democracy, and finds it in the polity God gave Israel under Moses, the elders and the people.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Every simple form of government breeds its own corruption and passes into the next in a natural cycle. A constitution that mixes royal, aristocratic and popular powers, so that each is checked by the others, resists this decay. Rome possessed such a constitution at the time of Cannae, together with customs that rewarded courage and honesty. Therefore Rome could survive disaster and conquer the known world, though even it will eventually decay.

Rhetorical device: analogy (simile). In ch. 10 Polybius compares the vice native to each constitution to rust in iron and worms in timber (quote 2), and in ch. 44 compares the Athenian people to the crew of a ship without a commander.

Debate: Resolved: That a mixed constitution is the best form of government.

Memory Work

For the people is the sole fountain of honour and of punishment

the constitution will receive a new name, which sounds better than any other in the world, liberty or democracy; but, in fact, it will become that worst of all governments, mob-rule.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using chs. 11–18, explain how the consuls, Senate and people of Rome each check the others, and argue whether Polybius is right that this balance made Rome strong in both danger and prosperity.

Comparison with Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius: Machiavelli retells Polybius's cycle in Discourses I.2 but adds that the conflicts between plebs and Senate made Rome free. Compare the two accounts of the Roman constitution and argue which better explains its strength.

Medical Lens

Book VI is a work of political and military history, and its medical interest is slight. Its conjectural history of society begins after floods, pestilences or famine have nearly destroyed the human race, a commonplace of Greek thought shared with Plato's Laws. The chapters on the army record Roman discipline in physical terms: flogging, the fustuarium (death by cudgelling at the hands of comrades) and decimation, as well as rewards for saving a fellow citizen's life. The account of the aristocratic funeral in chs. 53–54, with the body displayed at the Rostra and the wax ancestral masks, is a principal ancient source for Roman mourning practice. Polybius also speaks of polities, like bodies, as having a natural growth, zenith and decay (ch. 51), an organic analogy common in ancient political writing.

• Book VI, ch. 5

  The cycle begins after floods, pestilences or failures of crops have nearly destroyed mankind.

  Plague Epidemic
• Book VI, chs. 37–39

  Military punishments (flogging, fustuarium, decimation with barley rations) and the civic crown for saving a citizen in battle.

  WAR Wounds
• Book VI, chs. 53–54

  The Roman aristocratic funeral: the body at the Rostra, the eulogy, and the procession of ancestral masks.

  Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Divide the class into consuls, Senate and people. Give the consuls a war to fight and let each group use only the powers Polybius lists in chs. 12–17 to help or hinder it. Record which powers actually decide the outcome.

• Essay

  Draw Polybius's cycle of six constitutions as a wheel. Then choose one state from history and argue whether its story fits the wheel, departs from it, or shows the mixed constitution at work.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between a Spartan who defends Lycurgus's laws and a Roman senator after Cannae, using Polybius's argument in chs. 48–50 about which constitution is better for safety and which for empire.

• Fiction

  Narrate a Roman funeral as Polybius describes it in ch. 53, through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old watching the ancestral masks take their seats on the ivory chairs.

Further Reading

• The Histories (trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library), Polybius

  Greek text with facing English translation of all surviving books.

• Polybius, F. W. Walbank

  Sather lectures by the leading modern scholar of Polybius.

• The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity, Kurt von Fritz

  A detailed study of Book VI and its sources.

• Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli

  Book I, chapter 2 adapts Polybius's cycle.