Polybius and Democracy

A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, 2022

For who can be so ignorant or indolent to be uninterested by what means and under what form of government the Romans -in less than fifty-three years -have conquered almost the whole inhabited worlda deed without precedent in history? And who is there, so enflamed by other manifestations of study or spectacle, that regards anything to be of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge? With these words, at the start of The Histories' proem (1.1.2), Polybius presents his objectives and contents. These will be modified later when the initial chronological arc (220-167) is extended up to and beyond the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 (3.2-4). 1 But the core aim -to explain the success of Rome and its unstoppable expansion -is maintained. Polybius primarily intends to speak to a political audience, particularly that of Greek cities; this is his public. Polybius himself had played a prominent political role at home as a hipparch of the Achaean League before arriving in Rome in 167, immediately after the Battle of Pydna. His role formed the essential premise for the composition of The Histories. Starting from these assumptions, this chapter aims to show how Polybius, a Greek and one of the Achaean League's ruling elite, offered to the Greek public an interpretative picture of Rome's political experience, applying conceptual categories elaborated by Greek philosophical thought to this 'foreign' context. My argument is prompted by some recent discussion in the debate on the forms that politics took in Rome. This debate was stimulated by Anglophone scholars (starting from Millar 1998), then subsequently by those of the German school, with the fundamental contribution of Hölkeskamp 2010 (see Chapter 1; Chapter 7). In a discussion held in 2005 at the Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica on the problem of how to define Roman Republican politics in the twenty-first century , participants identified the need to recognise the peculiarity of the Roman Republican system by overcoming the dichotomy between 'aristocracy' and 'democracy', a false historiographical dilemma, which Polybius has helped to generate . With respect to these considerations, I would like to address the problem from another point of view: what are the features that unite certain political concepts,

Certainly there was no love for humankind found within the pages of Polybius in his exploration of the relationship between people and government. Throughout his account of the cycle of political revolution, it was human nature, the Machiavellian arch-villain, driving the degeneration of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy into their associated, corrupted and debased forms of tyranny, oligarchy and the brutal rule of violence. Humans were greedy and emotional, lacking reason, morals, ethics, principles governed by desires for wealth and power. Polybius realized, as did Plato and Aristotle, that humans corrupted government eroding the goodness of kingship, aristocracy and democracy into their associated, corrupted and debased forms of tyranny, oligarchy and violence. The age old adage that absolute power corrupted absolutely was rooted in the surety of humans, by nature being absolutely corruptible. Stable government was fleeting, short lived at the hands of humans. However, at the culminating point of his analysis, Polybius dehumanized the cycle of political revolution, attributing the degeneration of governments to inherent vices and flaws within particular constitutions rather than on the destructive and selfish nature of the people. Polybius argued that mixed government halted the degeneration of government into violence, prevented the absoluteness of political corruption which staved off the cycle of political revolution. It was mixed-government which made collective human existence, society, both feasible and productive, for it restrained the inherent vices and flaws within individual constitutions which permitted selfishness to flourish. The mechanism which made this paradigm work was Democracy. His essential conclusion was in his heralding of the construction of the Lacadaemonian constitution as the archetype of mixed government, the most perfect political form achieved by the Ancient Greek poleis, drawing from Xenophon’s historical analysis that the inherent nature of the Spartan polis brought equity and balance to society, and thus peace, stability and prosperity. Polybius resolved that the power structure of Spartan government which incorporated the dual-kingship, Council of Elders, and Ekklesia (he does not mention the Ephors) by harnessing the will of the people, to the leadership of the aged aristocratic elite and the royal, inherited, authority of the kings was the most sustainable constitution created. The living model for his work was the Roman Republican constitution and the interdependent relationships between the consuls, Senate, and assembly which, as Polybius argued, emulated the balanced constitutional structure first attempted in the Constitution of the Lacadaemonians. Polybius’ conclusion, that mixed government, republican government, prevented the violence of political corruption and subsequent degeneration of government was in stark contrast to Plato and Aristotle who argued that all forms of government were corrupted that did not address specific socio-economic reforms. Polybius dismissed that central premise of Plato and Aristotle which dictated that political reform in the absence of true socio-economic reform was meaningless and self-destructive. Noticeably absent from Polybius’ own historical analysis was any detailed explanation of the pervasive socio-economic reforms of Sparta, so well documented by Xenophon, that ruthlessly demanded conformity, enforcing sameness and equality. He mentions them only briefly in his comparison of the Cretan and Spartan constitutions: equal shares of land, and money devalued, but he does not apply them to an appreciation of the Lacadaemonian Constitution which deprived humans of their humanness by ruthlessly enforcing equality, repressing the self in service to the polis. Sparta, in the ideal, was a classless society dedicated to conformity and equality, in its most rudimentary forms. Land was shared, currency debased, education and meals communal, and there were no opportunities for work save for the barracks. Spartiates and their families dedicated their lives to the polis, priding themselves on humility, obedience, discipline, sacrifice and selflessness. Culturally then, Spartans were deprived of the tools of political corruption: greed and ego and took comfort in the old Pausanian maxim that laws controlled men, not men the laws. Polybius’ perspective was rooted firmly in his practical, pragmatic, approach to history and so there was no allowance for the philosophical: ethics and political theory. He contented himself with a vague statement in which he explained that customs and laws which encouraged men privately to be virtuous, well-disciplined, and the state to be civilized and just were to be commended. For the most part Polybius built his mixed-government on a pessimistic didactic: humans will always be human, and there was no expectation for anything less while government was a struggle between the noble and the degenerate with resolution coming only in one form, republicanism. Therefore, Polybius focused his attention on the reciprocity and equilibrium of power between rival socio-economic factions rather than on the shared, collective, attainment of virtue. Polybius’ pragmatism suggested that mixed government, republicanism, existed in the absence of individual virtue and wisdom, by preventing the conflicting interests which resulted in: tyranny, oligarchy, and chaos. In doing so, Polybius rejected measures that brought some sense of equality amongst the citizenry through socio-economic reforms centered on political compromise and increased financial stability through moderation. Polybius avoided any methods which sought to redefine and protect the disintegrating farming class from the vast plantation systems. Polybius rejected the creation of a sustainable and competitive economic market based on equity and reciprocity which protected citizens from bankruptcy and indentured servitude. He censured from his political discourse the development of debt solutions similar to Lykurgos, Solon and the Gracchi. As a result, Polybius rebuffed the symbiotic relationship between government and humans that was primary to Plato and Aristotle and fundamental to the socio-economic reforms of Lykurgos. Extrapolated then, from Polybius, at the conclusion of his historical analysis was that the Roman Republican constitution was a sort of hybrid of Spartan political structures and Athenian socio-economic practices.

History of Political Thought, 2017

This article examines the role of customary behavior in Polybius' political thought by tracing its functions in both his theoretical apparatus and his analysis of the Roman Republic. Not only providing theorists with a way to evaluate the quality and species of a particular polity, customs also partly determine political success and failure due to Polybius' commitment to certain views of human psychology. Proper recognition of the importance of customs for Polybius' political theory thus brings out the coherence of Book 6's political analysis more clearly and deepens our appreciation of Polybius as a pragmatic theorist of politics.

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought , 2020

The possibility of cooperation and the stability of political order are long-standing problems. Polybius, well known for his Histories analysing the expansion of Rome and his description of the Roman constitution, also offers an intriguing social and political theory that covers ground from psycho-anthropological micro-foundations to institution-based political order, providing a genealogy of morals and political order that is best understood in game-theoretical terms. In this paper I try to give such an interpretation. Polybius' naturalistic, proto-game theoretical views show similarities with Hume, Smith and especially Hobbes' doctrine of sovereignty by acquisition. However, Polybius is original in crucial regards, giving a motivationally plausible account of institutional and especially constitutional solutions to moral and political problems. Constitutional order, for Polybius, embodies and makes possible in the first place a kind of political reason that cannot be had individually. Polybian political theory thus offers interesting solutions to problems concerning moral motivation, collective action and the conditions for political order, as well as the explanation and character of institutions.

Studi Classici e Orientali 59 (2013), 2013

The aim of this article is to provide an institutional analysis of Polybius’ text (1,11,1-3) concerning the outbreak of the First Punic War. Polybius says that when the Mamertines’ request for help against the Carthaginians came to Rome, the senate – which was divided between advocates and opponents of a military commitment in Sicily – could not find a resolution, and the matter was decided by “the majority” that voted for entrusting the consul of that year, Appius Claudius, with the task to save the Mamertines. The ‘issue’ is represented here by the interpretation of Polybius’ term “the majority” (Oi dé pollói), that modern scholars have interpreted both as a reference to the majority of the Roman senators – assuming therefore that the final decision was taken by the senate – and as an allusion to the “majority of the Romans” – henceforth supposing that the question was ultimately decided by a vote of the popular assembly. This paper offers a third way, and suggests that the Polybian “majority” must be interpreted as a reference to the intervention of the Roman people, but not in the form of an official vote by the comitia. Several elements in the language of Polybius (i.e. the economic status of those who attended the meeting, and the role played by the consul in the gathering of this crowd) make us suspect that the popular intervention took the form of a "contio", that is an informal meeting through which a magistrate tried to create a popular consensus on a particular political initiative. A new political interpretation of Polybius’ passage is hence proposed, namely that the consul used the will expressed by the people in the "contio" in order to force the Senate to entrust him with the command he was asking for.

A. Lardinois, M. van der Poel and V. Hunink (eds.), Land of Dreams. Greek and Latin studies in honour of A.H. Kessels, Leiden (Brill) 2006, p. 372-383, 2006

This short article discusses a few opinions on and modes of reception of the Greek historian Polybius (ca. 200-ca. 118 BC) from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The aim is to show that after Machiavelli recognised Polybius as an important thinker on reason of state and political prudence, Polybius retained a special topicality for intellectual circles interested in Tacitism, Machiavellism and Realpolitik (for example with Justus Lipsius and Isaac Casaubonus), but that a generation later, for example with Hugo Grotius, those sharp edges were wearing off again, and Polybius returned to a role much closer to his original role in Renaissance historical and political thought, i.e. as a perceptive and authoritative author on social and political organisation, and as a source of historical material and examples that could be used to illustrate particular points in social, constitutional or political arguments.