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Introduction: F. W. Walbank, Polybius,

and the Decline of Greece
Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

This book derives from a conference, ‘Polybius 1957–2007’, held in Liverpool

in July 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first
volume of Frank Walbank’s Historical Commentary on Polybius. It might
instead have commemorated other milestones: the completion (if not the
publication1) seventy-five years before of Walbank’s Aratos of Sicyon; or—
still further back—his introduction to Polybius, when as an 18-year-old
schoolboy in 1927 he was asked by his teacher, Ned Goddard, to translate
and précis ‘a small, rather grubby German school edition’ (in the phrase used
in Walbank’s own unpublished memoir, the Hypomnemata).2 Above and
beyond any such dates, of course, the conference was intended not to honour
any particular volume but rather the man behind them. Frank Walbank was
unable to attend the conference in person, but he discussed with us our plans
for the conference, he opened the proceedings with a video message (printed
before this introduction), and he was able to read a number of the papers. He
died on 23 October 2008. Together with the contributors to this volume, and
many more, we remain hugely grateful for his support, for his example, and
for his scholarly legacy.

There can be no modern scholar more closely associated with an ancient

author than Walbank with Polybius. As Polybius made his life’s work the
telling of the story of ‘by what means and under what form of constitution
the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjecting the whole

1
The following year, 1933. All references in this chapter are to Walbank’s own publications
unless specified; Walbank’s papers are referred to by their first date of publication in English.
2
1992a: 76–7. The memoir covers Walbank’s life until 1946; Walbank’s extensive papers,
lodged in the University of Liverpool’s Sydney Jones Library, include notes preparatory to a
subsequent memoir, ‘Summary of years 1946–1977’: SCA D1037/2/3/21/57.
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2 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

inhabited world to their sole government’ (Plb. 1. 1. 5), Polybius and his world
were Walbank's life and work.3 In addition to the 2,357 pages of distilled
scholarship which make up the three-volume Commentary, the monographs
on Aratus and on Philip V which were the stepping-stones to it, and his
revisions to Paton’s Loeb edition (now emerging, but which for a long time
seemed to have ‘run into the sand’4), his numerous articles which range over
Hellenistic history and Greek historiography, even if they do not feature the
name of Polybius in their titles,5 are frequently rooted in interpretations of
his text. ‘Perhaps the day will come’, wrote one approving reviewer of Philip
V,6 ‘when Mr Walbank, as he matures, will attempt a general view, and give to
the general public (what his learning qualifies him to give) a picture of that
Hellenized eastern Mediterranean into which Rome moved, and with which
Rome fused, during the second and first centuries B.C.’ That too he duly
accomplished, through his Fontana History, The Hellenistic World, and (for
more scholarly readers) through his contributions to the histories of Macedo-
nia and the Hellenistic volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History which he
co-edited.7
Whatever disagreements might be had over details, and no matter that
some of his earlier publications—written, it should be remembered, around
three-quarters of a century ago—reflect the concerns and agendas of their
time,8 it is clear that, if any scholar’s output can be said to represent more than
the sum of its parts, Walbank’s can. His achievement, in the words of one
recent assessment (that of John Davies), was to ‘[bring] Polybios out of the
specialist side-channels into the mainstream of historiography . . . to make his
theme and period . . . into one of the central stories of Classical Antiquity,
and . . . to set the gold standard for a historical commentary on a Classical
text’.9 In assessing Walbank’s career in 1984, Arnaldo Momigliano listed him,
with Ronald Syme and A. H. M. Jones, as one of the three ‘Persons of the Great
Trinity of contemporary British ancient historians’.10 Although Walbank’s

3
Explored by Henderson 2001a.
4
2002: 2. Five vols. of the revised Loeb have now been published.
5
Cf. Davies 2011: 348–9. Many of these articles are included in two collections: Walbank
1985 (which includes a full list of Walbank’s publications up to that point) and 2002.
6
Dr Ernest Barker, Observer, 29 Dec. 1940.
7
1984a, 1984b, Hammond and Walbank 1988.
8
See Davies’ dispassionate critique of esp. Walbank’s Decline of the Roman Empire in the
West, 2011: 330–1, 343, of Walbank’s venture into the economy of the Later Roman Empire
(Walbank 1952), 2011: 331–2, or his remarks on Aratos (Walbank 1933), an ‘apprentice work’,
2011: 327. Cf. Plb. 3. 59. 2 ‘We should not find fault with writers for their omissions and
mistakes, but should praise and admire them, considering the times they lived in, for having
ascertained something on the subject and advanced our knowledge’, Walbank 1962: 1.
9
Davies 2011: 349–50.
10
Momigliano 1984. For Walbank’s account of his relationship with Momigliano, and of the
impact of their first meeting (‘I found the whole weekend . . . a completely new world’), see SCA
D1037/2/3/9/46, a letter to Oswyn Murray dated 24 Aug. 1988.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 3

later writings are peppered with modest acknowledgements of how his views
had been altered by subsequent work, or of his appreciation of the greater
complexity of a given topic11—for, as he says of Polybius, ‘no man can remain
entirely the same for fifty years’12—, there is also an extraordinary consistency
in his work, both in terms of the themes addressed and the manner of their
treatment, a consistency which conveys the sense almost of a sustained
programme.
How did he achieve all this? In part, of course, such productivity is the result of
longevity. As John Henderson has put it, ‘melodramatically, we could say that
it took Rome less time, according to Polybius, to achieve world hegemony—
fifty-three years—than FWW has had to polish off the Histories’13, and the same
point was made by Walbank himself in the context of Book 6.14 It was also the
result of an extraordinary doggedness, an eye for detail, and ‘ship-shape organi-
zation’—traits reflected also in his dealings with publishers, and the organization
of his papers15—as well as the difficult personal circumstances from which
Polybius provided a refuge.16
It also required imagination—the imagination, first, even to conceive of a
scholarly enterprise, such as the commentary, on so grand a scale and with
such a consistent format. (Although the first volume of A. W. Gomme’s
commentary on Thucydides was published in 1945, only a year after Walbank
had agreed to undertake Polybius, his ostensible model in early discussions
was How and Wells’ Herodotus.17) The leap of imagination required was all
the more extraordinary given the wartime context. As Kenneth Sisam of
Oxford University Press wrote to him in announcing that the delegates
‘have agreed to encourage’ the commentary, ‘It is good to think that in these
times scholars can still settle down to such long-distance tasks’.18

11
See e.g. 2000: 21, 2002: ix, 12, 18, 140, 153, 154, and n. 10, 156, 260 and n. 11, 266 n. 46.
12
1972a: 26.
13
Henderson 2001a: 221. Work on the commentary itself, however, began in 1944 and ended
in submission to the press of vol. iii in 1977.
14
1998b: 46: ‘I have been interested in this book for over fifty years—as long as it took the
Romans to rise to world dominion!’
15
See Henderson in this volume. Note, however, the contrast drawn by Dorothy Thompson
(in her funeral address, SCA D1037/1/1/10/2) between Walbank within and outside his study:
‘Frank did everything at a rush . . . He cut our grass in a lather and a flurry. Being driven by him
was not a restful experience. When he sat at his desk that outpouring of energy became mental
focus and may help to account for his astonishing record of publications.’
16
See Mitzi Walbank’s memoir in this volume.
17
See further Henderson in this volume. Note, however, that the first volume of Gomme’s
commentary, like that of Walbank (HCP i. vii), opens with an underestimate of the number
of volumes of commentary required: ‘This work is planned to be in three volumes’ (Gomme
1945: v).
18
See below, p. 53. Subsequently Walbank himself expressed regret that the pressure imposed
for immediate publications ‘makes scholars less inclined to take on work likely to occupy several
years’ (2002: 2).
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4 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

Imagination was also required to set Polybius and his Histories so painstak-
ingly within their setting. An understanding of the physical context of ancient
history, first, was fundamental both to Walbank’s own evolution as a historian
and to his historical approach. The cruise on which Walbank first visited
Greece and Sicily in the spring of 1930 was the prize for a Hellenic Travellers’
Club essay competition which had caught his eye, on the topic of federalism in
the Greek world.19 ‘[S]tudents [of ancient history]’, he wrote later, ‘should all
(ideally) have made their own periegesis of some Mediterranean land.’20 His
earliest work, Aratos of Sicyon, is replete with references to the geography of
modern Greece, the result of a Leaf Travelling Studentship awarded by his
Cambridge college in 1932.21 (‘From the top [of Pentelicon]’, he wrote in his
report on his travels, ‘there is as much to be learnt about Greek history as from
weeks of Bury.’22) In his reviews of others’ work, sketch-maps and illustrations
of topography are always welcomed, though ‘carelessness in matters of topog-
raphy may seem more venial’.23 As he enjoined his students, ‘Unless one
knows Greece as is, constantly making false pictures. Need of a conscious
effort to correct this.’24 At the same time, however, he needed to put Polybius
(and his audience) within their intellectual setting. As his discussion of Poly-
bian geography makes clear, he knew not to make unrealistic assumptions of
either:25
We habitually ask from ancient historians what we have no right to ask—namely
that their topography shall be adequate to permit of pin-pointing an action on the

19
See further 1992a: 103–6. See below, pp. 41–2, for Walbank’s federalism essay.
20
1949a: 101; ‘since this is now rarely feasible’, he continues, ‘it is essential that they should
have some alternative way of gaining a picture of those permanent features of the Mediterranean
landscape that control the way of life of its inhabitants’. Cf. Polybius own emphasis on the need
for historians to study topography (12. 25e. 1).
21
1933: ix; see further 1992a: 123–4.
22
SCA D1037/2/5/3, p. 6, continuing: ‘Attica lies spread out like a map, and one can trace the
various routes by which it could be invaded—Daphni on the pass through Aegaleos, and the
easier railway route to the north of the mountain, through Acharnae; the importance of Decelea,
now the air station of Tatoi, during the Peloponnesian War, is at once evident; and the story of
the shield at Marathon is lifted from the realm of fable, and becomes a possibility, if nothing
more.’ Walbank also gave a more anecdotal account of his travels in a lecture ‘Modern Greece’,
from the same period: SCA D1037/2/4/8/1/4.
23
See e.g. 1947a (with a ‘collection of Alpine views sufficiently catholic to suit all theories of
Hannibal’s route’, p. 109), 1960b (on Hammond), 1950a (on topographical errors).
24
Lecture notes on ‘Geographical background to Greek history’, SCA D1037/2/3/18/125 p. 4.
See, in particular, 1956a, on the route of Hannibal’s pass through the Alps, and his recurrent
concern with the route of the Via Egnatia, e.g. 1977c, 1983a, 1986 (see also ‘The Via Egnatia: its
role in Roman strategy’, SCA D1037/2/3/9/19/1).
25
1948a: 164, foreshadowed in an unpublished lecture ‘The Reliability of Polybius’, delivered
18 June 1946, p. 7 (SCA D1037/2/1/5/1–2); cf. 1943c: 79 (‘to demand complete consistency in
Polybius’ use of technical language is to invite disappointment’), 1972a: 117–24. See also his
critique of J. O. Thomson, 1949b: 361, for his lack of sympathy for his subject-matter, ‘little
patience for the past myths and follies of mankind, for its confusions of thought and errors of
judgement . . . he seems almost to apologize for mentioning such obvious nonsense’.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 5

contours of a large-scale Austrian Staff Map. Polybius had not the advantage of
such a map, nor his readers either. For them, a long list of barbarous place names
could have little meaning
There is a danger, however, of rendering Walbank as too coolly detached,
his scholarship as merely the result of a long grind of historical reconstruction.
Just as a central theme within his published work is the blindness of historical
actors to the broader movements to which they were contributing (discussed
below), so Walbank was highly sensitive to the contextual character of histori-
cal work itself and of the capacity of the historian to fail to appreciate this.
Reviewing, half a century later, his earlier work on the idea of Greek history as
a ‘struggle for Greek unity’, he supposed that ‘today . . . such an approach to
Greek history must seem strangely out-of-date . . . mainly important to us
today as a reminder of how much our preoccupations as historians may
later be seen to have reflected contemporary issues’.26 (His own approach to
the question, though it was indeed coloured by contemporary concerns—as
we shall see—nevertheless in many ways anticipated much subsequent schol-
arship on Greek identity.27) Walbank also—as befits a historian working on
Polybius—had a clear vision of history as a dialectical process; or as he put it
more graphically: ‘Studying history does not mean absorbing the past as if one
were drinking coffee.’28 With retrospect, it is easy to see how the themes of
Greek federalism, of Achaean resistance to the looming ‘cloud in the west’, or a
focus on the role of great men in history, spoke to contemporary concerns.29
In some of his earliest work, however, as will become apparent, he showed a
willingness to develop analogies to contemporary history, or to reveal his own
political commitment,30 explicitly. As his Hypomnemata make clear, he was

26
2000: 19; much of the argument of Walbank 1951 is anticipated in 1933: e.g. 2 (though cf.
p. 21). Cf. his comments on Rostovtzeff 1941: Walbank 1944: 10 (‘his view of ancient history
appears to have been influenced by his own vivid apprehension of certain contemporary events
in Europe’), or on the interest of South African historians, 1953a, in the ‘broad question of how
men of differing race, nationality, religion, and politics got on together in the ancient world’.
27
See also 1972b: 146–7.
28
1993a: 15: ‘it is a dynamic, dialectical process involving investigation, selection and
interpretation. At each stage the historian interacts with his material. The past is in some
sense recreated afresh for each person who concerns himself with it.’ Cf. the preface to 1940a:
xi (‘Historical science, no less than history itself, represents a continuous process of integration’).
29
Cf. Henderson 2001a: 228. For great men, see e.g. 1933: 1, 28, 165–6; see further pp. 9–10
below, on Cleomenes III.
30
By his own account, Walbank had been a Labour sympathizer since ‘at least 1922, when
[he] felt strongly on the side of the miners’, 1992a: 120; he had joined the Socialist Society and the
League of Nations Union in 1930–1 at Cambridge, 1992a: 108. During a seven-week stay in Jena
in 1931 he ‘had become very conscious of the dangers presented by the Nazi movement’, 1992a:
121 (cf. pp. 115, 128–9); reinforced by Mary’s more practical commitment (p. 132), later in the
1930s, he joined the Communist party, was Hon. Sec. of the Merseyside branch of the National
Council for Civil Liberties (active in writing to local papers to counter National Union of Fascists
propaganda), and was Chairman of the local branch of the Left Book Club. For his reading in this
period, see below, n. 33.
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F. W. Walbank, Bassae (1936)

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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 7

‘often worried by the problem of reconciling the subject of my work with the
world we were now living in’.31

The work in question covers, at least prima facie, a wide historical range: in
chronological order, an unpublished paper ‘Social Revolution at Sparta’
(1935), a short piece published under the pen name ‘Examiner’ asking ‘Is
our Roman History Teaching Reactionary?’ (1943a), ‘The Causes of Greek
decline’ (1944), his short book The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West
(1946a), and a contribution to The Cambridge Economic History of Europe on
the late Roman economy, completed in the same period as The Decline of the
Roman Empire, but published only in 1952.32 It is quickly apparent, however,
that these pieces all develop a common approach and a common historical
thesis—an approach and a thesis which drew on (his response to) contempo-
rary events and to a whole discourse on civilization and its decline which
dominated the inter-war years.33 ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’ may look
primarily at the reasons for Greek impotence in the face of Roman expansion,
but it soon turns into a broader thesis of the decline of antiquity: ‘For in fact
the Greek and the Roman failures are in essence one.’34
History, first, is pressingly, urgently relevant—or in Walbank’s term ‘topi-
cal’. ‘[To] the men of Western Europe the problem of why Rome fell has
always been a topical question’ (his italics)—even if ‘the answers to this

31
1992a: 188, cited by Henderson below.
32
The argument of 1944 can be seen anticipated e.g. in Walbank 1943d, and especially 1942c
(a review of Rostovtzeff 1941). For Walbank’s extensive notes on the late Roman economy, see
SCA D1037/2/3/15. By Walbank’s account, 1992a: 97, a crucial role in introducing him to the
ideas of Rostovtzeff was played by the undergraduate lectures of Martin Charlesworth.
33
A point given prominence by Momigliano 1984: ‘First of all, it is impossible to think of
[Walbank] as a man and as a historian without bearing in mind the pre-war atmosphere of
discussion on ancient and modern problems of civilization.’ For Walbank’s reading, see e.g.
1992a: 76 (indoctrination, by Ned Goddard, with the ideas of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the
West: ‘later, of course, we all threw off these ideas and many other semi-mystical notions to
which Goddard was partial’), p. 121 (G. B. Shaw). An early notebook, SCA D1037/2/3/22,
contains two pages of reactions to Toynbee, A Study of History IV. 58ff. Spengler and Toynbee
feature in his discussion of the reception of the mixed constitution in his third 1957 Gray
Lecture, SCA D1037/2/1/11/9, p. 332 (Polybius ‘among the distant progenitors of Oswald
Spengler and Dr. Toynbee’), though cf. its published version, 1964a: 34–5. The intensity and
breadth of Walbank’s engagement with contemporary events can be gauged by his year-long
Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) course on World Affairs, run at Lytham, in 1945–6,
SCA D1037/2/1/4; lectures (mostly country by country) are interspersed with weekly updates on
events across the globe; see below for the range of Walbank’s modern analogies in later writings,
p. 25.
34
1944: 11; for the pairing of Greek and Roman decline, cf. 1983b: 199, where Walbank
locates the achievement of de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World in ‘its
treatment of two developments of magnitude—the destruction of Greek democracy from 400 bc
onwards and the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire’. Walbank brackets 1943a,
1944, and 1946a together in his memoir, 1992a: 188–9.
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8 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

problem themselves form a commentary upon the ages that proposed them’.35
‘The Causes of Greek Decline’ begins with Ser. Sulpicius Rufus’ evocation of
the death of the cities of Greece in his letter of consolation to Cicero on the loss
of his daughter (Fam. 4. 5. 4) before, with a magnificent film-like sweep,
pressing the urgency of the question in a contemporary context:36
The Saronic Gulf, once the centre of the world, was now, for all that Greece
meant, a dead lake lapping about the foundations of dead cities. In that tragic
decay—which was not confined to mainland Greece—we are confronted with one
of the most urgent problems of ancient history, and one with a special signifi-
cance for our generation, who were already living in an age of economic, political
and spiritual upheaval, even before the bombs began to turn our own cities into
shattered ruins.37
The causes of decline, whether Greek or Roman, lie deeply in the structure of
society: the ‘social relation of the classes’, the ‘contrast which underlay ancient
civilization, between the leisured class of the city and the multitude labouring
to support it on the land’, and the failure of the middle classes to extend
democracy.38 The foundation of classical civilization on slavery and exploita-
tion allowed for ‘brilliant minority civilization[s]’: so, for example, the ‘citizen
of fifth-century Athens felt himself to be the member of a compact, brilliant,
exclusive, and highly conscious community, which was, in fact, living largely
at the expense of the resident alien, the slave and the subject ally’.39 But there
was a price to pay.
The pattern of class division led, first, to an ideological cleavage, a contrast
in Greek culture between the ‘things of the hand and the things of the mind’.40
In the Greek case, it led also to a failure to achieve unity, ‘the unity which alone
might have enabled them to preserve their freedom from outside conquest’.41
And the class system also brought about a stagnation in the kind of technical
development that could have triggered an industrial revolution—and which,
in turn, would have allowed for ‘mass civilisation, and also the concentration

35 36
1946a: 1. 1944: 10.
37
A phrase sharpened, perhaps, by direct experience: Walbank’s service in the University Fire
Watch, ‘tak[ing] a bearing on any fire that might be started by incendiary bombs’. See further
1992a: 175–7.
38
1944: 12, 1946a: 23.
39
1946a: 67, 1944: 12. Cf. his ‘violent dissent’ from the position of J. L. Myres, 1946b: ‘For
instance, if “even in the most advanced and . . . progressive cultures of the Mediterranean the
confessed goal was statical equilibrium”, the stories of fifth-century Athens, republican Rome,
Dandolo’s Venice, and Mussolini’s Italy suggest that this confessed goal had little relevance to
actual policies.’
40
1946a: 24. Contrast Rostovtzeff 1941: 1311–12, seeing the lack of Greek unity as putting a
stop on creativity.
41
1944: 11: ‘. . . where the artistic achievement of the Athenian Acropolis was made possible
only by a tyrannous imposition exacted from unwilling subjects, what hope was there of unity?
And what meaning was there in freedom?’
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 9

of the proletariat in factories and mines under conditions which enabled it to
attain a community of purpose and a realisation of its own strength’.42
There were sparks throughout antiquity of social revolution43—a term
which he justifies at length in his 1935 lecture.44 These, however, were
comfortably suppressed. First, through bread and circuses, in other words by
putting a plaster over the situation. Secondly, through more aggressive action:
by ‘strengthen[ing] the instruments of the State’—what he refers to (in the
context of later Roman empire) as the ‘Corporative State’.45 (‘Rigid state
control’ then undermined the successful laissez-faire approach to economic
activity of the early principate—with the Diocletianic price edict standing as a
symbol of the transformation.46) And, finally, through what Walbank refers to
as a ‘cultural failure’, by ‘the implanting of beliefs and attitudes convenient to
authority’. Plato is a particular villain here, guilty—for his recommendation of
religion as a means of social control in the Laws—of ‘the blackest treason to
that flowering of the human spirit which we call Hellenism’. But subsequent
philosophy is likewise condemned for narrowing its focus with ‘a common
note of defeat’.47
There is one word which sums up this response to social inequality: fascism.
The ‘corporative state’ of later empire reveals a ‘complete political, social and
cultural correspondence’ with modern fascism:48
Both institutions represent an attempt to force a decaying social system to
continue working at the expense of the happiness and freedom of the masses of
the people. Both cater for the luxury needs of a fortunate minority, while forcing
the rest to accept scarcity and hardship as their natural portion. Both go together
with cultural decay, a decline in rationalism and scientific thought, and the
fostering of superstition and new myths, whether of the saving grace of Mithras,
or of the saving grace of Aryan blood and soil.
‘The Social Revolution at Sparta’—a piece rich with parallels to Lord Rother-
mere, Dr Goebbels, and English public schools—likewise casts the Spartan

42
1944: 19, 1946a: 68. Walbank’s use of the phrase ‘mass civilisation’ can in part be seen as a
rejoinder to the much more negative and conservative use of the term by F. R. Leavis, author of
the notorious Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930). Walbank was taken for
tea with the Leavises, in 1930–1: see 1992a: 123.
43
1946a: 71–2.
44
The use of the term is, very likely, due to the strong influence at the time—on both Frank
and Mary Walbank—of Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics
and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay (London, 1934): see 1992a: 128.
45
1946a: 46–7; cf. p. 68 for the aggression of the City-State (which ‘precisely because it was a
minority culture, tended to be aggressive and predatory, its claim to autonomy sliding over
insensibly, at every opportunity, into a claim to dominate others’).
46
1952: 33.
47
1944: 15, 1944: 12; cf. 1946a: 68. Contrast Rostovtzeff ’s characterization of the ‘buoyant
optimism’ of the age, 1941: 1095.
48
1946a: 76.
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10 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

reformer Cleomenes III as ‘unconsciously . . . foreshadowing the development
and methods of the fascist dictatorship’:49
Establish the cult of the nationalist state, win a position of unquestioned com-
mand by a coup d’etat, and maintain it by force of arms and keen propaganda; let
freedom be defined as the right to do as one is told . . . it is no mere accident that
we find both here and in modern Germany appeals to an imaginary golden age
under Lycurgos or the ancient Germanic heroes; emphasis on agriculture as a
firm basis for the state; marshalling of the young in military fashion; careful
organisation of thought through propaganda and censorship; rooting out of
unsympathetic elements from the state by the employment of proscriptions and
assassinations; the subordination of the individual to the state and an aggressive
nationalism which rejects the claims of any greater unit than the national state.
Was this pattern of decline—first into fascism, then atrophy—an inevitable
one? When it comes to the ancient world, the answer is uncertain. ‘The Social
Revolution at Sparta’ suggests that there was an antidote to Greek decline
(addressing the underlying social problem, extending democracy) but that it
was one which was out of their reach. (‘What no-one offered, because no-one
knew how to offer it, was a solution that would have given the workman a fair
return for his labour, that would have removed the gap between the rich and
the starving, and would have enabled a united and contented Greece to face
Rome without class-warfare for ever striking her in the rear.’50) ‘The Causes of
Greek Decline’ suggests more emphatically that a solution was impossible in
antiquity, projecting its hopes onto the later adoption of a classical legacy.
Even in the western half of the Roman empire there was never a complete
break, in turn allowing for an ancient legacy to be the basis of a form of
liberation in the modern world (but at what point?):51
Consequently, when the barbarian invasions were themselves events in the
distant past, and new towns began to spring up in Europe, inhabited by neither
serfs nor slaves, the techniques of the ancient world were there for men to build
on. Unobtrusively the craftsmen grouped around manor or monastery had

49
1935: 16, continuing (pp. 16–17): ‘The analogy must not of course be pressed too far; there
are forces of capital and large scale industry behind modern fascism that simply did not exist in
3rd century Sparta.’ The portrayal of Cleomenes in Walbank 1933 is markedly less negative; see
also 1966a for the argument that Polybius saw Cleomenes as tyrannically undoing, rather than
returning to, the Lycurgan constitution; his account of Cleomenes’ revolution, 1984b: 458–9, also
contains no fascist overtones.
50
1935: 29–30.
51
1944: 20. Cf. 1946a: 82–4, 1952: 85 (‘With the collapse of the imperial state, that large
section of the economy which depended on it simply disappeared. The residue—small artisans
and traders in the towns, local markets, itinerant craftsmen, the villages around the manor or the
monastery, and, for the rich, an irregular trade in luxuries from all parts of the Mediterranean—
was left as the economic foundation of medieval Europe’). For a similar trope of long-term
transmission of a classical heritage (the idea of monarchy) see, with variations, 1983d: 20, 1984a:
100.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 11

passed their knowledge down from father to son. And so once more, in an
atmosphere free from the deadening effect of the ever more rigid class-system
of late antiquity, men could go forward to the mastery of nature. With them
they bore the full cultural legacy of the ancient world, adapted now to a task
from which antiquity itself had necessarily drawn back, but which gave promise
of easy accomplishment to the new and fruitful partnership between mind
and hand.
In the modern world, by contrast, there was no inevitability to fascism and
decline, a point hammered repeatedly in Decline of the Roman Empire.
Fascism had closed itself off to the changing world, but the different circum-
stances of the modern world—industrialization, the ‘unlimited possibilities’ of
economic growth, and above all ‘the will and the capacity [of the working
class] to take over the organization of society in order to transform it into an
equalitarian community’—were all entirely new.52 ‘Hence we have no reason
to regard as our inexorable lot a stagnating, latter-world Byzantinism, resting
on a rigidified industry, with industrial barons offering, gangster-like, the only
resistance to an all-powerful State and common men creeping humbly be-
neath the protection of bands of rival exploiters. The future offers us some-
thing brighter than that.’53
This unshakeable belief in progress extends also to historical methodology.
‘Today the period is taking on a more definite shape: gradually the old
problems are being solved.’54 In particular, the explosion of material evidence
removes the historian’s dependence on literary sources, making it possible ‘for
the first time . . . to turn a microscope on the ancient world’. The effects of this
on knowledge of the ‘social man of antiquity’ are ‘the greatest revolution in the
classical studies of the last sixty years’.55 When ‘Examiner’ asked the question
‘is our Roman history teaching reactionary?’, it was not a question which
looked long for an answer. ‘Three years of war have clarified a good many
issues . . . The war has forced us to take sides.’56 And so it is crucial that
schoolboys should be able to distinguish in their understanding of Roman
history between ‘intellectual assent’—understanding, for example, that Au-
gustus’ religious revival was a ‘“good” measure for him, in those circum-
stances’ he faced—and ‘moral approval and emotional enthusiasm’.57 If we
only ‘turn out the crambe repetita of our grandfathers, then, I suggest, our

52
1946a: 76–9. Walbank does conceive dangers in industrialization, e.g. the tendency of
industry to ‘export itself ’, 1946a: 28, 78, exemplified by the migration of cotton manufacture
from Lancashire to Bombay.
53
1946a: 80; cf. p. 76.
54
1937: 224, continuing ‘but there are unfortunately still enough to make a simple exposition
well nigh an impossibility’. Cf. 1954b: 51 on Holleaux.
55
1946a: 5–6; see also 1945b. Walbank was clearly thinking, in large part, of Rostovtzeff: see
1991/2: 90.
56 57
1943a: 57. 1943a: 60–1.
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12 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

schools might do better to stick to mathematics.’58 And it is not the case that
schoolteachers are inadvertently failing to pick up on a more enlightened
consensus: ‘Our present attitude towards the history of the late republic and
early empire is largely a legacy from an age and a class which are now
themselves part of history’. History needs to be rewritten from a perspective
free of class divisions—and, as he wrote in the aftermath of war, the humanist
and the historian brought together, in an alliance both ‘offensive and defen-
sive’, within a renewed Classics in which ‘we draw no frontiers’.59 ‘Cicero must
no longer be forced into the pattern of the Victorian statesman. We must
study him and read him against his own background and try to judge him by
his own standards and criteria. We must be conscious of how strange the
Greeks and Romans were, how different from, as well as how like ourselves.’60
The drive here to resolve the various dissonances between work and world
is very clear. If we all espouse values of democratic openness, we must teach
accordingly. It is not just, however, that the study of the past should be aligned
with contemporary values. The conclusion of Decline of the Roman Empire in
the West is that ‘it is our duty . . . to exert every sinew against the tendencies in
our own society which resemble those predominating in the late Empire . . . ’.61
The unique problems of the contemporary world demanded an education
tailored to them. As Walbank asked in a post-war lecture ‘Science, History and
the Atomic Bomb’, written in the context of the new Education Act: ‘What
kind of training will create the kind of people who can stabilise world society?
i.e. WHAT IS AN EDUCATION for the age of ATOMIC POWER?’ The
answer: ‘Must be a combination of science and humane studies’.62 Science
provided the means for society’s development (as well as for its destruction)—

58
1943a: 60; a delayed response perhaps to the domineering head of Classics at Bradford
Grammar School, L. W. P. Lewis, for whom see 1992a: 65 (cited below by Henderson, pp. 39–40).
59
1950d: 117; cf. his Inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin (1946), ‘The Roman Historians on
the Roman Republic’, SCA D1037/2/1/7/1/1, p. 3 (‘The Humanities are of their essence the whole
story of the classical world and its heritage, and within them we draw no frontiers’).
60
1950d: 116–17 . The passage is reminiscent of Walbank 1951: 58 (quoted below, p. 28) as
well as of the famous passage of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, section IX.
61
1946a: 80; cf. pp. 84–5. The same urgency is reflected in an earlier lecture, given as part of a
series on citizenship (though history) for the Durham County Community Service Council in
Sept. 1938. The final lecture concludes with questions over ‘the future of our liberties’, SCA
D1037/2/1/3/1:
Conclusion:
—there is an attack on our liberties
Defence—vigilance and agitation: unity.
Context: that of wide-spread fascism [illegible reference to Ulster Unionists, 1913]
Burning of Papers—Hitler
Chamberlain—?
Duty of Citizen to safeguard his rights, to watch over those on whom authority is conferred.
62
SCA D1037/2/1/9/1/7.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 13

one should resist an obscurantist reaction against scientific culture—and yet
science also had its limits.63
At the same time, however, tensions emerge which are worth highlighting.
The conclusion that we should put our energies into righting the wrongs of
our own civilization is conceived as an alternative to ‘solacing ourselves with
the passing of moral judgements on those who are now long since dead’:64
it is an historian’s business to understand, not to moralize, to discover causes and
results, not to pass ethical judgements on individuals and policies. And let us
avoid like the plague superficial analogies with the fundamentally different
circumstances of the modern world. (1943a: 61)
And yet it can scarcely be claimed that Walbank here avoids moralizing
himself. ‘Let us remind our classes of the truism—exemplified in Europe to-
day—that no nation can enslave others and yet remain free itself ’; Rome had ‘a
price to pay’ for its expansion; ‘the provinces found themselves obliged to
shoulder the whole burden of an extravagant oligarchy and an unnaturally
swollen and degraded populace’:65 it is hard to see these statements as reflect-
ing only the dispassionate identification of historical patterns.
There might appear to be a contradiction also in Walbank’s disavowal of
analogies between ancient and modern. But the reasons he gives (in a foot-
note) for this position—on the one hand, the presence of slavery, on the other,
the ‘completely changed material basis of modern society’, in other words the
technical progress that offers the modern world its defence against fascism—
suggest an answer: your analogies are superficial, mine are not. A similar
contradiction appears when it comes to the idea of the ‘topical’. The contribu-
tions to (the first edition of) the Cambridge Ancient History of Oertel ‘conform
to an old-established tradition for discussing the decline of Rome . . . he has
approached it as a topical question, relevant (as all history must in the long run
be relevant) to the issues confronting us in our times’.66 It is not clear where
Oertel’s fault lies: would the lessons only emerge later? In approaching the fall
of Rome as a topical question, how was he acting differently from Walbank?
Or was his fault not in fact in the approach but in the answers it generated?
Had Oertel failed to transcend his own context?

63
Brash and Walbank 1946: 80, 85 (‘[La science] . . . est impuissante à créer un code de
morale et une échelle des valeurs, à resoudre les problèmes d’organisation sociale et à determiner
les principes d’une vie raisonable, toutes questions sur lesquelles la culture classique a toujours
son mot à dire’); the war, fought for western humanistic values, had had the ironic effect of
subordinating the humanities to ‘des études ayant un rapport plus immediate avec les besoins de
la guerre mécanique’ (p. 73, reprised at 1950d: 113).
64
1946a: 85.
65
1943a: 60, 1946a: ix, 17; see also 1942c: 82 on Rostovtzeff ’s bourgeoisie.
66
1946a: 69, 74–5.
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14 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

Finally, there is perhaps an aporia in Walbank’s model of the ‘mass civilisa-
tion’ that industrial techniques can unleash. ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’ takes
as its starting-point Rostovtzeff ’s question:67 ‘Is it possible . . . to extend a higher
civilisation to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting its
quality to the vanishing point? . . . Is not every civilisation bound to decay as
soon as it penetrates the mass?’ It is a question he answers by inverting it:68 it is
only by penetrating the mass that civilizations can survive. And yet what would
this ideal civilization, based on a ‘partnership of mind and hand’, look like? It
would be based first on values ‘to which to-day . . . we all necessarily subscribe’:69
We believe in the virtue of free thought and discussion, in coming to conclusions
on the basis of objective evidence, in deciding our courses of action through the
operation of an informed democracy: we are against the autocratic rule of a group
or an individual, we reject dogmas (such as racial teaching) based on emotion, a
priori assertions that must not be tested, ‘inspired’ truth as the controller of
scientific investigation. If anyone doubts that we have made up our minds about
these values, let him consider the fact that 99.99 per cent. of the people of this
country are ready to fight on in an increasingly conscious struggle against the
Fascist enemy who denies them all.
At the same time, there is also a harshness—born of harsh times—in both the
rhetoric of scientific (and historiographical) progress and in the picture of
society that is conjured up. ‘In one way or another’, Walbank claims, ‘our own
society has incorporated within its texture all that matters of classical
culture . . . ’.70 But when one looks for culture, the emphasis throughout is
on the practical, suggesting perhaps an unease over high culture: ‘Buses,
bicycles and trains bring the villages to the town; the postal catalogue, the
wireless, the van, and the cinema bring the town and city to the village.’71 If
this failure to realize a cultured mass civilization counts as an aporia it is one
shared by his contemporaries. On the threshold of war, Louis MacNeice asked
and answered Rostovtzeff ’s question in similar terms:72
. . . It is so hard to imagine
A world where the many would have their chance without

67
1944: 10 on Rostovtzeff 1926: 436, 484; cf. Rostovtzeff 1941: 1125.
68
Cf. Davies 2011: 331.
69
1943a: 57. There is a close parallel again here with Walbank’s directly political writings. See
e.g. his letters to the Wallasey News, in answer to a Miss Collins of the British Union of Fascists
and National Socialists, SCA D1037/1/8/6 (e.g. a letter of 27 Nov. 1937: ‘Let us be quite clear:
Fascism is a movement which denies democracy in theory and outrages it in practice; and it
claims liberty of speech to-day only in order that it may destroy it the moment it achieves the
power to do so.’)
70
1946a: 84.
71
1946a: 73. On the interpenetration of town and country, see Walbank’s observations, 1991/
2: 94.
72
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal , sect. III, written 1938.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 15

A fall in the standard of intellectual living
And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.
Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking
That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,
The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher
And not return more than you could ever give.

This wartime period was, unsurprisingly, the high-water mark of Walbank’s

efforts to find direct political lessons in antiquity. As John Henderson has
discussed,73 notwithstanding the fact that his work on Polybius ‘always turned
on the assumption that the life and times of the history-writer must interac-
tively engage with the production of the work’, Walbank soon learned to efface
his own political engagement, an engagement which had had the ironic effect
of disqualifying him from active service in the war against fascism.74 Just as
Polybius was ‘kidnapped, for History’,75 so Walbank chose henceforth to
‘[abide] by the depersonalizing regime of the commentary within the ascetic
order of Scholarship’.76 In his memoir—which ends its narrative, significantly,
in 1946, the date at which he was appointed to the Liverpool Chair of Latin—
Walbank distances his Decline of the Roman Empire in the West as a tract for
the times, ‘not objective history as the historian understands it’.77 He also
appears to undercut his own ‘political effusion[s]’, by juxtaposing reports of
his lectures or publications with more momentous historical events, VE Day
or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.78 As Henderson characterizes
Walbank’s own narrative, ‘FWW as good as marries into a . . . political radi-
calism that implodes before it can charge up a crusade, and instead ends up
depriving him of a war, of all the histrionic rush and proving of self. His
(substitutive) efforts to mobilize historical writing and Classics get neatly
mocked by the planetary enormities of thermonuclear detonation . . . ’.79
This narrative of Walbank’s rejection of an earlier more direct political
engagement through history-writing, of his ‘[smoothing] away obsolescent
and lapsed investments and intellections’,80 needs to be qualified, however.
First, it is clear that in the first decade of his career, he was writing in,
experimenting with, a variety of styles and approaches. Many of the themes
of ‘Social Revolution at Sparta’ feature in Aratos, although there they are

73
2001a and 2001b.
74
See Davies 2011: 329–30 for the circumstances; for the Hans Bauer affair, Walbank 1992a:
161–5, 170–2.
75
Henderson 2001b: 37 (‘The aliens good as flew him off to another planet, and made
Polybius “ours” ’).
76
Henderson 2001a: 222.
77
1992a: 187–8.
78
1992a: 191; on VE day, Walbank ‘was talking to the St Anne’s Rotary Club on “Is History
Bunk?”’. Cf. his account of Koestler’s stay, 1992a: 146–7, revealing that they were really liberals.
79
Henderson 2001a: 227.
80
Ibid: 229.
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16 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

subordinated to a conventional historical narrative free of more than passing
references to contemporary events.81 What was appropriate for the lecture hall
was not appropriate for a first monograph. The Decline of the Roman Empire
in the West was a different kind of book for a different audience. (And the
same holds true of his later work: retrospective essays allow for a kind of
reflection not possible within commentary.)
Another way of putting this would be Walbank’s own: academic work, on
the one hand, and political activity on the other were two worlds—‘almost like
two separate forms of existence’ ‘temporarily brought together’: through the
figure of (the Swansea professor) Benjamin Farrington, or through the corre-
spondence with Piero Treves which moved effortlessly between the two.82 In a
letter of 30 May 1942, for example, Treves dreamed of a post-war Italy: ‘—a
free, liberated, decent and European Italy—, where Frank will be coming to
lecture at our Universities on things Greek, Mary to inquire into the condi-
tions of the Italian workers, and the children to enjoy Italian landscape, art
and cooking.’ As this mirage suggests, however, it was Mary Walbank who
was the more actively political of the two: he ‘had the academic’s inclination
to talk and discuss and then to leave it at that: for Mary a conclusion was the
first step to action.’83 With gradual political disillusionment, Mary’s periodic
ill-health, and an academic career that became increasingly engrossing, the
two worlds of academic work and political activity may well have diverged
further.84
At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that the roots of Walbank’s later
work lie precisely within this explicitly political phase. This is most clearly true
of Walbank’s long-standing interest in federalism: a concern which reaches
back to the 1930 prize essay which launched him on the M.V. Théophile
Gauthier to Greece, and onto his career. This was the very year that he had
joined the League of Nations Union,85 and the ‘Federal idea in Greece—with

81
1933: e.g. 49–51, 86–7, 95, notably giving Cleomenes credit for being ‘largely prompted by a
genuine idealism’ (p. 86).
82
Two worlds: 1992a: 153, 166; cf. p. 187 for Farrington’s invitation to Walbank in 1943 to
write the Decline of the Roman Empire in the West. Treves correspondence: SCA D1037/2/3/1/
55–6, 59–63, 121.
83
1992a: 132.
84
A crucial moment in Walbank’s own narrative is the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact: ‘this
political reversal coincided with Mary’s breakdown and seemed to be part of a shattering of all
previous points of reference’ (1992a: 173); cf. p. 188 (‘I was still a Marxist (of sorts)’, in the
context of the latest ‘contemptible’ shift of Communist policy, their reversal of their attitude to
the war after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941).
85
1992a: 108; Classics and the League of Nations had coincided for Walbank in the figure of
Gilbert Murray, who had spoken to the Bradford Grammar School ‘Sixth Classical’ when he was
in Bradford for a League of Nations Union meeting (1992a: 74), and who lectured on the
Hellenic Travellers’ Cruise, 1930 (1992a: 105). For Murray’s League of Nations activities, see
Stray 2007: esp. pp. 217–37.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 17

special reference to its development in Hellenistic times’ already directly
exploits the parallel between ancient and modern:86
To the modern student this conception of Federalism and its practical application
is of intense interest, since it is to a form of Federalism that Europe is today
looking as a remedy for its misfortunes . . . And so it is well that we should at the
same time recognise that it is to Greece that we owe our original conception of
federal government; that it was in the Achaean League that men whose patriotism
was far more local, and so far more intense than ours, first learned to sacrifice that
patriotism for the good of a greater body.
Walbank’s subsequent reading in the thirties included researches into the
widest variety of forms of political organization: in Celtic Ireland, Polynesia,
and pre-Roman Italy, among other societies.87 After the war, however, the
study of ancient federalism became no longer just a search for a better
alternative but also a form of inquest. So, in the concluding lecture of his
1945–6 course on World Affairs:88 ‘The problem of peace. Why did we fail
1918–39? Growth of Nazi Germany! Yes, but why was the LN inadequate?
Because the big nations would not shelve national authority.’ What of the
future? ‘Towards world organisation? Is a world state possible or desirable?
What would be the transition? Federation? In Achaea, Switzerland, USA.’ At
this point, a marginal note shouts out: ‘value of ancient history!’
The roots of Walbank’s least directly topical work, the Polybian commen-
tary can also be seen to lie within this political phase—and not only in the
limited sense that it was in this period that the commentary was initiated.
Walbank’s memoir gives the impression that the choice of Polybius as the
subject of a commentary was almost serendipitous.89 But this is probably
misleading.
Walbank’s reviews of others’ work in the period running up to 1944 suggest
that the idea of an outsized scholarly project that might take a lifetime had
been playing on his mind. ‘The publication of vol. xii of the [Cambridge]
Ancient History on 20 April, 1939, brings this vast work to completion’;90 a
project, he adds, the design of which was based on ‘rigid exclusion of all
prejudice, whether of race, creed, or party’. ‘In its comprehensive framework’,
his critique of Rostovtzeff concludes, ‘its vast learning, its careful weighing of

86
SCA D1037/2/4/1/2, pp. 11–12; see D1037/2/4/1/1 for notes for the essay, D1037/2/4/1/3–5
for associated paperwork. Compare the second lecture of Walbank’s 1938 Durham County series
on citizenship, SCA D1037/2/1/3/1, asking whether the ‘voluntary liquidation of states’ was
possible. See also 1935, ‘Social Revolution at Sparta’, p. 3 (on the debt of modern federal
organizations to the Achaean League and Aratus), p. 9 (on the Achaean League as ‘the
instrument of the upper classes, a consolidation and guarantee against social revolt’).
87
SCA D1037/2/3/18/8, 10; D1037/2/3/21/1, 23.
88
SCA D1037/2/1/4/32, entitled ‘Forms of World Organization’.
89
See further Henderson in this volume, pp. 46–53.
90
1939/40: 54.
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18 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

evidence, its lively style, and above all in its essential humanity, it stands out as
a triumphant assertion of that European scientific tradition which admits no
frontiers of race, language, or creed’.91
As is clear from these examples, such projects—and we may suppose, the
idea of the Polybian commentary—were attractive because they embodied
values, not because they were free from them. As his reviews of wartime
German scholarship make clear, the idea of a scholarship tainted by ideology
is not just an abstract construct. ‘It is sincerely to be hoped that G. will
eventually publish his proposed continuation of this study under conditions
which no longer encourage the pernicious irrelevancies of Rassentheorie.’92
Similarly he lampoons the underlying narrative of Stier’s Grundlagen und Sinn
der griechischen Geschichte:93
Ultimately, S’s interpretation of Greek history rests on a mystique, that of the
indogermanic-nordic soul, with its unique collection of virtues . . . the chief among
them being love of freedom. Greek history is the story of the clash between the
innate European idea of freedom and the idea of order, which the Greeks took over
from the Aryans of Asia, who had absorbed it from the soul of that continent. This
conflict between freedom and order, after many vicissitudes, was eventually
resolved by Christianity on the inner plane of the individual conscience.
At the same time, however, even a work which took a more enlightened cue
from contemporary events (Schachermeyr’s Alexander der Grosse), modelling
its historical protagonist negatively in the light of the recent phenomenon of
National Socialism, was still subject to criticism: as ‘perhaps over-schematic,
too much influenced by recent experiences’.94
In other words, just as the wartime context encouraged the quest for a
history that wore its topicality on its sleeve, it also exerted a contrary force:
heightening, rather than diminishing, the appeal of a scholarship conducted
for its own sake, that could express humane values untainted by ideology. (To
respond appropriately to the topicality of one’s subject was to tread a peril-
ously narrow path.) This model of humane scholarship, however—though it
may have been idealistic—was never woolly. Walbank revealed an instinctive
distrust of abstract generalization as early as Aratos, but this tendency was

91
1942c: 84. Cf. 1945b on Taubenschlag, The Law of Greco-Roman Egypt in the Light of the
Papyri (‘The present volume is a monument . . . to the integrity of purpose which, at the outset of
the war, brought this sixty-year-old professor from Cracow to Aix-en-Provence and subsequent-
ly, in 1940, to Columbia University, so that he might crown a life’s work with this study . . . ’).
92
1942b: 88. For the emphasis on racial discrimination in Walbank’s political activity, see e.g.
his anti-fascist letters to the Wallasey News, SCA D1037/1/8/6, or his lecture on anti-semitism,
‘one of the greatest dangers and tricks in the reactionaries’ pack’, for a WEA World Affairs
course run at Lytham, 1945–6, SCA D1037/2/1/4/29.
93
1948b: 161.
94
1950c: 188. For the particular relationship between German scholarship and the Hellenistic
world, see 1991/2: 91.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 19

only reinforced in this period.95 In the aftermath of the war, for example, he
threw himself into the rebuilding of scholarly links across Europe,96 but as he
did so he resolutely distanced himself from any bombast. ‘A conference on
“the universal value of humanism”’, he began a paper to the Rome meeting
of the Sodalitas Erasmiana in 1949, ‘cannot escape definitions’; his was a plea
‘for the humanist . . . to come out of his seclusion and adapt . . . to new condi-
tions’.97 ‘One feature of the old [humanistic] classical training’, he insisted
later, ‘was to create canons of clarity and relevance, and to discipline the
writer’.98 Without this faith in scholarship, how else could Walbank have gone
on writing and publishing, in the depths of war, such distilled scholarly pieces
as ‘Olympichus of Alinda and the Carian Expedition of Antigonus Doson’?99
At the same time, the grander the planned project the greater the act of faith in
humane scholarship. To ask how he could have conceived such a plan in
wartime is on one level misconceived: the war itself helped to generate the
scale of his ambition.
Why Polybius? Given the scale of his previous work on Hellenistic history,
this is perhaps the wrong question. The question that needs to be answered is
why he ever thought to suggest any other work (Tacitus’ Histories)? The
minimalist explanation is that Tacitus’ Histories was suggested to him as a
topic (in 1943) by his mentor, and at the time Head of Department, James
Mountford. Despite Mountford’s powerful influence, however, this minimalist
explanation for a choice of topic is part of a pattern in Walbank’s narrative
whereby all his academic choices are subject to chance—a pattern belied by the
intensity of his academic interests.100 His other writings in the same period

95
See also the pattern of his distrust of metaphors masquerading as explanation: e.g. 1946a:
66, 1959b: 245.
96
See e.g. Brash and Walbank 1946, Walbank 1950d, and the evidence of his correspondence
with Louis Robert, SCA D1037/2/6/1/20/52, 54, 55, 56, in which Robert gave a list of wartime
French scholarship.
97
1950d: 112, 116, continuing to ask: ‘in short, if we cannot—as we assuredly cannot—have
the whole cake, whether we cannot have a half, a quarter, or at least some fragment, which may
awaken a taste here and there for a discipline which we cannot afford to lose’.
98
1953b: 49. Cf. his puncturing, 1966c: 197, of the ‘inflated and bombastic claims’ of a
history sponsored by a special International Commission for a History of the Scientific and
Cultural Development of Mankind. It was perhaps this tendency to undercut grand claims that—
for all his political passion—prevented him from ever being a ‘party man’. As he warned the
students of the Socialist Society in a post-war lecture, SCA D1037/2/1/9/1/2, ‘Warning: Don’t
become “party” man in a narrow sense (—of any party!). Join parties if you think they are right
but—don’t pretend they are infallible. Infallibility is a religious claim not a political one. Don’t
surrender your power of judgement.’
99
1942a; an article appreciated by Louis Robert in their post-war correspondence (‘précieux
pour moi’), letter dated 4 Nov. 1945 (SCA D1037/2/6/1/20/54).
100
Mountford’s suggestion: 1992a: 186. Cf. his choice of Aratus (as opposed to the Delphic
oracle) as his first research topic (p. 109), or his settling on a biography of Philip V (after
‘recalling a statement by W. W. Tarn that a series of monographs on the Antigonid kings of
Macedonia was a desideratum’, p. 151). Walbank undertook considerable preliminary research
on Tacitus’ Histories in this period, although it is not clear whether this antedates Mountford’s
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20 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

suggest some alternative answers. Although the decline of Greece and the
decline and fall of Rome are envisaged as parts of the same story, Greek decline
is no more than the first act; in turning to the Decline of the Roman Empire
in the West, on the other hand, he would turn his attention to the end of
the story. Secondly, although this may seem remarkable in the light of his
subsequent achievement, he may well have had an intrinsic preference for the
principate over the Hellenistic world as a historical period. Although it
contained within itself the germs of its own destruction—and so a commen-
tary on Tacitus would still have been a contribution to the central question of
ancient history, the question of decline—Walbank conceived of the early
empire in mostly positive terms, the high-point of a laissez-faire approach to
economic activity, a successful political compromise.101 By contrast, ‘Any-
thing that follows Demosthenes’, he wrote of Hellenistic history in 1943, ‘must
seem an anti-climax—though not, of course, without its own interest and
significance’.102 When Tacitus was thought to be spoken for, he reverted to
Polybius, the historian of Greek decline and fall, so that when word came from
Syme, in neutral Turkey, that Tacitus was in fact free, his choice was irrevers-
ible.103 Walbank’s 1943 piece ‘Polybius on the Roman Constitution’ shows
very clearly the bridge between ‘The Causes of Greek decline’, on the one
hand, and the commentary on the other: Polybius was unable to see the
‘contradiction in the very structure of second-century society . . . ; his whole
upbringing combined to prevent his coming to terms with it’. He was attracted
to the idea of anacyclosis as he struggled to deal with the ‘shadow of coming
disaster thrown already over the internal history of Rome by the accumulation
of foreign conquests . . . ’.104 With only a little hindsight, the choice of Polybius
could easily be rationalized: as Walbank wrote in 1950 (in a review of a volume

suggestion (a terminus post quem is provided by a 1942 exam paper used as scrap): SCA D1037/
2/3/18/5–6. Walbank was clearly still entertaining the possibility of working on the Delphic
oracle as late as 1939: a letter from Benjamin Farrington, 29 Jan. 1939, SCA D1037/2/6/1/20.
101
See e.g. his review of von Fritz, 1955b: 154: ‘It is clearly quite unrealistic to minimize the
weaknesses which lay beneath the façade of early imperial prosperity. But it is equally unrealistic
to neglect the achievements of the first two centuries of the principate and the relative success of
Augustus’ compromise.’
102
1943b: 91.
103
1992a: 186.
104
1943c: 89, 88, continuing ‘In a flash of inspiration the bourgeois historian of Megalopolis
began to recognize in the first signs of popular unrest, in the first systematic challenge from
within to the rulers of an empire now unchallengeable from without, the herald of approaching
ochlochracy’. Cf. McDonald and Walbank 1937 on Roman imperialism, ‘Polybius and the
Growth of Rome’ (summarized as Walbank 1946d), SCA D1037/2/3/21/3, pp. 30–1: ‘Polybius
was blind to some of the most essential features of the scene, because he was obsessed with the
presuppositions of the circle from which he sprang, and its counterpart among which he lived at
Rome; his blacks were too black and his whites too white. And when at last the facts of change
intruded upon his notice, his solution was to superimpose the pessimistic theory of the
anacyclosis, to substitute perpetual movement for perpetual immobility—but in a form which
equally ruled out the idea of progressive development.’
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 21

published, as he noted, in a series entitled Problemi d’oggi), ‘there are few
ancient writers whose work has the same immediate claim upon our interests
today. POLYBIUS writes about things we have all known, Italians not
least . . . ’.105

Even after this point, even as the urgent topicality of the ‘causes of Greek
decline’ becomes sublimated in commentary, it is clear that Walbank’s con-
cern to relate his work with the world did not evaporate. As Momigliano later
observed, of the three Persons of the Trinity (Syme, Jones, and Walbank) ‘even
in Jones the concern for the modern world was less pressing and explicit than
it was and is for Walbank’.106
Far from being left to moulder on the shelves, for example, The Decline of
the Roman Empire in the West was reissued in expanded and revised form in
1969 as The Awful Revolution, a title that consciously echoed Gibbon.107
‘[T]he strident immediacy of the original gave way to a more scholarly
tone’;108 further reading sections are added, and the corporative State is re-
branded as the Authoritarian State. It is worth pausing, however, over what
remained: the book’s opening declaration of the perennial topicality of the period
(p. 11) or of the power of new approaches in turning a microscope on social life
(pp. 16–18); its characterization of the ‘minority civilization’ of Athens, based on
exploitation; its final injunction to the reader to focus his or her energies on the
amelioration of modern society, and—in general—the whole thesis of social
inequality and ‘stagnation of technique’ leading to authoritarianism and collapse.
The question of whether a savage fascism inevitably awaits modern Europe is
broadened (pp. 114–15). The common trend in the Late Empire and the modern
world is not towards fascism per se, but
from an age of laissez faire to one of control and state planning. From this point of
view—whatever their other differences—there is a common element in the
regimes of nazi Germany, communist Russia , ‘capitalist’ U.S.A and the ‘welfare’
states of Great Britain and several other European countries. Are we then (it is
sometimes asked) witnessing a new and ominous stage in our civilization in
which we must all gradually sink into a state of regimentation similar to that
which heralded the end of western Rome . . . ?

105
1950b: 273.
106
Momigliano 1984; ‘Walbank’, he continued, ‘would not be the historian he is without his
deep commitment to rationality, social justice and international understanding’, before speculating
how much of that is owed to family background.
107
1992a: 189. See the ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’ in
ch. 38 of Gibbon 2004: iv. 175–6: ‘This awful revolution may usefully be applied to the
instruction of the present age.’
108
Davies 2011: 343; it was still, he adds, ‘a serious essay in historiographical theory, offering
a fully worked-out Marxist analysis of the “Decline and Fall”’.
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22 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

It may be said quite decisively and at once that there is no such necessity
whatsoever driving the world of the twentieth century towards authoritarian
tyranny.
The reason again is found in the different economic conditions of ancient and
modern society. In short, the political call of the Decline of the Roman Empire
in the West is not muted but refreshed. As late as 1983, he described de Ste
Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World as a book ‘which goes to the
heart of some of the most important problems confronting students of the
ancient world’—whilst maintaining positions from his Decline of the Roman
Empire in the West.109
The same pattern is evident in Walbank’s adaptation of his original remarks
on the ‘barbarian peril’ in the modern world. In 1946 a more confident picture
is presented of barbarism at bay, with a memorable quotation from another
passage in Gibbon’s ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in
the West’: ‘The plough, the loom and the forge are introduced on the banks of
the Volga, the Oby and the Lena, and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have
been taught to tremble and obey.’110 If barbarian peoples still pose a danger, it
is only by virtue of their gaining material civilization and so the technical
means of threatening civilization—with Japan cited as an example of the
dangers of ‘too readily assuming that technical civilisation necessarily involves
all-round culture’.111 By 1969 faith in civilization is less pronounced, and the
potential for barbarism is, it is emphasized, within all peoples, though Wal-
bank turns once more to the same passage from Gibbon:112
Can we be sure that the possession of the plough, the loom and the forge—to say
nothing of the jet fighter and the hydrogen bomb—are sufficient guarantee that
their owners will also automatically exhibit a high degree of civilization? . . . A
salutary and painful lesson has taught us that barbarism in this sense remains a
danger at all times, and in all societies, and that the price of civilization, like that
of freedom, is eternal vigilance.113
Walbank no more recants his views on inequalities in the Greek world than
on the fall of Rome. So much is made explicit in Walbank’s 1970 Presidential

109
1983b: 200. For his extensive notes on de Ste Croix 1981, see SCA D1037/2/3/21/22. See
also his comments on Marx’s distinction between Asiatic and Classical modes of production
(and on de Ste Croix’s underestimation of serfdom), 1991/2: 92–3 and n. 12. See also 1956b: esp.
p. 293, taking issue with Katz’s The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Medieval Europe, for failing to
do justice to the importance of slavery as a cause of decline, reiterating the arguments of
Walbank 1946a, but then conceding ‘this is merely one point, singled out largely because it
interests the reviewer’.
110
Gibbon 2004: iv. 177.
111
1946a: 78.
112
1969: 118–19.
113
Compare his call for vigilance in a 1938 lecture, SCA D1037/2/1/3/1, quoted above, n. 61.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 23

Address to the Classical Association (CA), a lecture which returned to the
paper with which he had first addressed a CA ‘Annual Assembly’, at St Albans
in 1944, ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’.114 His captatio benevolentiae gently
mocks his youthful self, explaining the genesis of the original paper in terms of
its wartime context. Quoting the response of Frank Adcock, then Professor of
Ancient History at Cambridge, to his St Albans paper (‘perhaps a little one-
sided’), he sought then to ‘atone’ by giving the other side, by discussing a ‘field
in which the Hellenistic age can be justly said to have made a more positive
contribution’, the experiment in Greek union of the Achaean League. And yet
he studiedly fails to recant the position of that earlier paper:115
The V2 attacks were still at their height; and with the manifest signs of catastro-
phe on every side, it had seemed to me—for I was an earnest young man—that
the causes of Greek decline might be an appropriate subject on which to expatiate.
My paper was devoted, I remember, to a discussion of the exclusiveness of Greek
civilisation, the technical stagnation of the Hellenistic age, and the failure of the
Greeks generally to extend their culture downwards to reach the masses of
the poor . . . [Professor Adcock] was perfectly right: it was one-sided—though
I thought (and I still think) it was an important side.
In an earlier version of the Presidential Address, a paper ‘The Political
Contribution of the Achaean Confederacy’ given in June 1967, he invokes
an argument reminiscent of ‘The Social Revolution at Sparta’: by leaving the
social problem ‘suppressed and unsolved’, the Achaean League ‘had thus
saddled itself with a liability which was to play a significant part in the final
debâcle’.116
Moreover, when Walbank turned back to Greek historical narrative, in his
Fontana history of the Hellenistic world (first published in 1981), it is striking
how much of the pattern of ideas of his early ‘political’ phase shines through.
The Fontana history achieves, arguably, a kind of marriage between the
political and apolitical styles of the mid-thirties to mid-forties. Long-standing
social problems were ‘endemic in Greece for many centuries’: ‘a low living
standard, the absence of any margin to meet lean years or upsets due to
mobilization and war will have played a large part in reducing peasants to a
condition of dependence from which it was virtually impossible to emerge’.117
Economic distress and class conflict led to the threat of ‘social revolution’,
though the upper classes were ‘fairly successful in their use of palliatives’.118

114
Published as Walbank 1970b; see also Walbank’s enthusiastic reception of Claude Mossé’s
Marxist thesis of the decline of the Greek city-state, 1963b.
115
1970b: 13–14; Walbank returns to the theme of the St Albans lecture (‘the failure of the
Achaean confederacy to solve the social problem’) in conclusion, 1970b: 26, but then insists on
finishing on a positive note.
116
SCA D1037/2/3/21/38, p. 28; cf. 1935: 29–30 (quoted above, p. 10).
117
1992b: 166.
118
1992b: 167–75, 170.
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24 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

Here, in short, is the essential narrative of ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’,
Walbank’s Marxist theory of decline.119 His portrayal of the decadent end of
Ptolemaic Egypt significantly also makes the connection with the conditions of
the later Roman empire and—without invoking the spectre of fascism—is
clearly reminiscent of the corrupt obscurantist Corporative State:120
The power that the Crown has lost has fallen into the hands of the priests and of
certain influential individuals, whose ability to offer protection . . . to runaways
and others in distress seems to anticipate the conditions of the declining Roman
empire half a millennium later. For this collapse of Ptolemaic rule there are many
causes, some of which have been examined above, but to those must be added a
disastrous foreign policy, the loss of markets abroad, the wastage caused by
internal unrest and civil wars, incompetent government at home, bureaucratic
corruption and currency depreciation. In considering the whole sorry tale it is
difficult not to echo the judgement of E. Will that Ptolemaic Egypt fell a victim to
its own wealth employed in the service of interests which were not its own.
By contrast to ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’, however (but in line with
other earlier formulations121), Walbank seeks to balance the picture, just as he
had done in his CA Presidential Address. ‘[The] flame of rational enquiry had
begun to burn low and we can detect a growth in the attraction of mystery
religions and eastern cults’, though the Hellenistic age is also said (in the same
sentence) to have ‘remained a time singularly free from obscurantism and
censorship . . . ’.122 Credit is given for the scientific discoveries of the age, but—
for all the reasons we have already seen (the cheap price of human labour,
whether free or slave, the contempt for manual labour123)—the Greek cities
‘never took a decisive step in the direction of harnessing scientific discoveries
to the practical use of human communities and the achievement of material
progress’.124 As in his earlier work also, the decline of Greece is set within a
grander, historical canvas. Rome is both destroyer and heir of ‘this fertile age’;
empire led to the creation of a ‘single cultural continuum in which many

119
Though contrast the opening of Momigliano 1984: ‘It must have been in 1947 or 1948
when I told Frank Walbank that (Soviet) Russian reviewers of his books, though thinking that his
attempts at being a coherent Marxist were not very successful, had a healthy respect for his
scholarship.’
120
1992b: 122.
121
See e.g. the synopsis, SCA D1037/2/1/6/1, of a lecture ‘The Hellenistic Age’, read to the
Sheffield Branch of the CA, 6 Nov. 1946, opening ‘A just appreciation of the Greek contribution
to Western Europe cannot omit the achievements of the Hellenistic Age’, or the positive
definition of the Hellenistic world (focusing on the exchange of ideas, prosperity, and the
linguistic koine) at 1935: 3–4. Cf. the bolder description of the Hellenistic age, 1991/2: 113, as
‘one of the most dynamic in Mediterranean history and perhaps one of the most influential in
respect of what was to follow afterwards’.
122
1992b: 250; cf. p. 209 on traditional religion as a husk.
123
1992b: 192–4.
124
1992b: 184; cf. 194–5.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 25

aspects of the Hellenistic world lived on’, to enjoy a ‘ghostly existence in
Byzantium’.125 And the issue of whether there was another way is left hanging.
Walbank speculates whether, ‘given another century without Rome, federal-
ism might have developed fresh and fruitful aspects . . . Federalism offered the
possibility of transcending the limitations of size and relative weakness of the
separate city-state. But time ran out.’126
Walbank’s concern with the topical survives in the repeated analogies to the
modern world scattered through his work: in references to Chairman Mao,
Smuts, the Vietnam peace talks, Red Square march-pasts, working men’s
clubs, or (less passingly) to comparisons between ancient and modern feder-
alism (‘No ambassadors travel abroad from Pennsylvania, Wyoming signs no
treaties’127). Such analogies are more than just decorative. The 1970 CA
Presidential Address justifies the topic of federalism in terms of its contempo-
rary importance, albeit more guardedly than in the grand opening of The
Decline of the Roman Empire in the West (‘So perhaps its role in the Greek
world may seem to be not entirely without topical interest’128). He makes this
claim despite knowing, he adds, that ‘it is unpopular and even thought to be
slightly disreputable for a historian to point to modern analogies’.
For the most part, however, the topical aspect of Walbank’s work, and the
sense of the historian’s commitment that relates to it, from now on appear
more obliquely. A common pattern is for such contemporary relevance to be
projected onto others—even as Walbank guards himself against simplistic
associations between ancient and modern. His survey of Polybian studies in
the last quarter of the twentieth century, for example, found that ‘it is hard to
dissociate [the remarkable post-war surge of interest in Polybius] entirely from
the contemporary clash of powers and the rise of the United States to pre-
eminence, which were to dominate the next fifty years’.129 Similarly, the
opening words of Walbank’s preface to the first volume of the Commentary,
through comparison with Schweighauser’s eighteenth-century commentary,
make the implicit claim that his contemporaries will, self-evidently, identify
with the themes of Polybius’ Histories:130

125
1992b: 251, 249, 28; notably, it is primarily through the cities, ‘vital units of civilized life’,
that the Hellenistic legacy was transmitted (p. 249).
126
1992b: 157–8.
127
1976/7: 35, 1964a: 244, 1977b: 85, 1984c: 54; cf. 1972b: 148, 1967: 135, 1991/2: 96, 1992b: 63.
128
1970b: 14. Cf. 1966b: 388 on Toynbee’s use of ‘enlivening’ parallels, 1949b: 360 (on
J. O. Thomson), 1954a: 18, reviewing an edition of Plutarch’s Dion: ‘none of Plutarch’s Lives is
more immediately relevant to these post-war years, when Dion and Heracleides are still familiar
figures in a liberated Europe’.
129
2002: 1. For a similar litotes, see 1964a: 260 (the roles of the US and Rome ‘not altogether
dissimilar’). Cf. Walbank’s observation (1944: 10) on Rostovtzeff 1926: ‘The comparison with
Bolshevik Russia and the ancient world in decay is constantly implicit in his narrative, and
frequently he pauses to draw a direct analogy’.
130
HCP i. vii.
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26 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

The last full commentary on Polybius, that of Iohannes Schweighauser, was
published during the French Revolution; but his eight massive volumes . . . are
fundamentally untouched by the stirring events going on at the time. . . . His
commentary is primarily philological; whereas most people who read Polybius
today turn to him as the main source for much Hellenistic history, as the
historian of the Punic Wars, and, above all, as the first man who really came to
grips with the problem of the rise of Rome to world empire—which is equivalent
to saying that his readers today are pre-eminently those who share his interests.
It is these readers whose needs the present work is intended to meet.
As John Henderson has put it, ‘“we” are “today” self-reflexively alive to the
Revolutions, the stirring events, the problem of world empires, which entitles
us to claim to share Polybius’ interests’.131 Here is the claim of ‘The Causes of
Greek Decline’, that the events of the decline of Greece have ‘a special signifi-
cance for our generation’, recapitulated. History-writing is not overshadowed
by the enormity of surrounding events; it draws its power from them.
Nevertheless, it is particularly in the context of discussions of the historian’s
role that a sense of the historian’s proper commitment reveals itself. A crucial
figure in this process of self-definition as a historian is Gaetano De Sanctis,
whom he first read as a student in 1930–1132 and cited as a model as early as
1943 in the conclusion to ‘Is our Roman History Teaching Reactionary?’
‘Properly told’, the Roman republic could be a tale ‘damning to the enemies
of liberty and democracy’:133
It is no mere accident that Gaetano de Sanctis, perhaps the most eminent Roman
historian of our generation and a great liberal thinker, broke off his Storia dei
Romani abruptly at 167 b.c., never to complete it. His last volume, published in
1923, when Fascism had been in power for a year, is dedicated—who can read the
words to-day unmoved?—‘to those few who disdain alike to be oppressed and to
make themselves oppressors’. The story that De Sanctis could not finish in
Mussolini’s Italy it is our task as teachers of Roman history in a democratic
country to tell.
The implicit contrast here between De Sanctis’ abrupt halt at 167 bc and
Polybius’ own decision (3. 4) to continue writing Roman history after 167 bc is
a powerful one, but it is mitigated by Walbank’s own claim that such history is
still a story that must be told. De Sanctis is also the subject of a later essay,
written in 1983 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his refusal to swear
the fascist oath, published in English only in Walbank’s second volume of

131
Henderson 2001a: 230–1.
132
1992a: 108 (his reading of De Sanctis was at first limited to a large portion on the
Hannibalic War); see here Davies 2011: 327. De Sanctis acknowledged a copy of Philip V in a
postcard dated 10 Nov. 1945, SCA D1037/2/6/1/20/58; Walbank subsequently went to De
Sanctis’ door in Rome (and met him briefly), in Sept. 1949 (pers. comm., April 1998).
133
1943a: 61.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 27

collected papers in 2002. The essay is in part a defence of Polybius from De
Sanctis’ charge that he was a quisling of Rome—clearly a charge for De Sanctis
born from his personal circumstances, and a recurrent concern for Wal-
bank.134 At the same time, however, it is difficult to resist hearing echoes of
Walbank’s own position in what he says of the parallels between De Sanctis’
and Polybius’ careers (for both ‘an alternative means of self-expression’).135
And even as Walbank regrets that De Sanctis could not have been more
forgiving of Polybius, even as he points towards the dangers of using ends
to justify means, he aligns himself with De Sanctis’ moral perspective on
history:136
His deep sense of humanity and hatred of injustice and oppression would have
prevented De Sanctis from ever supposing that ends—whether regarded as aims
or, retrospectively, as the results of the historical process—can justify means. But
to talk of historical justification is to run the risk of seeing history in those terms;
and when we speak of imperial conquest leading to the spread of humanity and
civilisation, we should, I think, not forget—as De Sanctis did not forget—the cruel
fate of Numantia and the severed hands of Uxellodunum.
De Sanctis is also a key inspiration behind one of Walbank’s most emphatic
methodological statements (from his much cited article, ‘The Problem of
Greek Nationality’)—a statement, if not of the historian’s duty to make
moral judgements, at least of his or her duty to make full use of the advantage
of hindsight. Walbank makes a distinction between two levels of historical
interpretation. The first level of interpretation is to ‘investigate the various
policies and aims of Greek and non-Greek statesmen, the interests likely to
influence them, the actions of the various states, and their outcome, in terms of
the concepts and ideals and knowledge actually available to the people
concerned’.137 It is essential, he continues, however, that the historian goes
beyond this first level:

134
Cf. 1970a: 305, 1995: 274, 284.
135
2002: 320, continuing ‘It was as a direct result of his own personal disaster that Polybius
produced his great work’.
136
2002: 313.
137
1951: 58. The italics are ours. The tension between these levels of interpretation is explored
earlier through Walbank’s narrative of Aratus, e.g. in its ironic concluding comparison of
Cleomenes and Aratus (1933: 166) or his analysis of Sicyon’s admission to the Achaean League
(‘there is no evidence that [Aratus] envisaged any of the consequences of the step he was taking’),
in the conclusion of Philip V, 1940a: 275, or in his critique of Stier 1948b: 160: ‘Not only the facts,
but the criteria by which to judge them must sometimes be drawn from the knowledge of later
generations. One need not make an anachronistic theory of Greek unity one’s touchstone in
order to assess the overwhelming price which Greece paid for the luxury of inter-polis warfare,
and to see in this loss one of the causes of her downfall; nor is it unhistorical to characterise the
nationalism which could not advance beyond the city (just as so far we have failed to advance
beyond the nation state) as particularist. If the historian is concerned with the whole story he
must assign responsibility in this way: if on the other hand his task is merely to assess the positive
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28 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

[He] is also living in his own age, with all the advantages of knowing how the play
ended; and he can see each act in relation to the whole.138 Now because of what
De Sanctis has called the ‘creativity of history’ its process is not a mere series of
permutations and combinations similar to that of shuffling cards or shaking dice.
Out of the clash of deeds and policies, the genius or the malice of outstanding
individuals, the unthinking obedience or the revulsion of the mass, the victories,
defeats, migrations, conquests, and settlements, the social struggles, the shifting
currents of trade, and all the infinite variety of a thousand and one other factors,
something new is constantly coming to birth; and what is born in this way is
neither a haphazard nor an arbitrary creation but stands in a logical sequence to
all that preceded it.
There is also an interplay through Walbank’s work between Polybius’
methodology, perspective, even personal narrative, and his own. At one level,
we see in Walbank an identification—however unwitting—with the practical
Polybius. A function of the prevailing ideology of contempt for manual work
was, according to ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’, ‘the diversion of scientific
thought away from practical experiment . . . into notional and metaphysical
channels’.139 Walbank’s laudatory account of the Achaean League, in his CA
Presidential Address, climaxes with the observation ‘And all this was done by
practical politicians who owed virtually nothing to political theorists’.140 Simi-
larly, just as Polybius resists the temptation to arouse an emotional response in
his reader,141 so he later summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of (a later
study by) Stier by describing it as an ‘extremely interesting, if somewhat
emotionally charged, study’.142 At the same time, the ‘disingenuousness’ with

contribution of the Greeks (as S. seems to suggest), he may prefer to limit himself to their own
standards.’
138
Walbank’s analogy of history and drama goes back to his prize essay on federalism, SCA
D1037/2/4/1/2: one result of the modern interest in federalism (p. 1) is that ‘the curtain has
ceased to fall upon the spectacle of Greek history with the death of Alexander, but the play has
been prolonged to a truer if less dramatic climax in the rout of Scarpheia and the burning of
Corinth’.
139
1944: 15; he also portrays expenditure on festivals, as opposed to ‘capitalist and industrial
expansion’, as ‘going into unproductive channels’. Cf. Plb. 9. 20. 5–6, cited at 1972a: 124: ‘I
strongly disapprove . . . of any superfluous adjuncts to any branch of knowledge such as serve but
for ostentation and fine talk . . . and I am disinclined to insist on any studies beyond those that
are of actual use.’
140
1970b: 27. Cf. 1947b: 658 (‘Thiel writes of the sea as one who knows it . . . ’).
141
Cf. 1938: 64: ‘Polybius makes no attempt to involve the reader emotionally in the
development of the situation’. Walbank would return to the contested topic of tragic history in
1960a: see now Marincola in this volume.
142
1963a: 7, discussing Stier 1957. Statesmen too, not least Philip V, are regularly assessed for
the degree to which they are mastered by their emotions, e.g. 1940a: 260, Hammond and
Walbank 1988: 219 (‘Demetrius occupied the throne of Macedonia . . . without ever disciplining
his restless nature to the pursuit of a single consistent policy, or deciding whether to concentrate
realistically on ruling Macedon effectively or to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of a universal
empire’).
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 29

which Polybius claims to ‘defend high principle’, Polybius’ identification with
Roman imperial expansion, his ‘ruthless’ acceptance of the means employed
(‘success was apt to be his main criterion’), and his lack of sympathy for those
caught up in its progress are plainly a concern:143
One thing worries me a little. Polybius’ commitment to the doctrine of ‘the
possible’ is no doubt a praiseworthy quality in a statesman—even though the
really ‘great’ statesman is the man who makes his own definition of the possible.
But had this commitment perhaps a slightly corrupting effect on Polybius as a
historian? With his increasing sympathy for Rome, the successful super-power,
goes a marked lack of sympathy for those who had resisted her.144
Moving beyond such ex cathedra statements on methodology and approach,
and at risk of being fanciful, it is also possible to trace a more delicate, implicit
relationship between these two co-dependent historians. Given Polybius’ fa-
mous opening statement, it is striking how frequently the figure of fifty years
features in Walbank’s own work. De Sanctis’ ‘great act of courage’, the work of
Schwartz, his own study of Greek nationality, the development of Holleaux’s
thesis, are all reviewed after half a century—in each case to consider (in a
parallel to Polybius’ extension?) ‘how far [they have] stood the test of time’.145
Walbank’s reflection (quoted above) on the coincidence of the post-war surge
in interest in Polybius and contemporary affairs—‘the contemporary clash of
powers and the rise of the United States to pre-eminence, which were to
dominate the next fifty years’146—suggests that this fifty-year trope is more
than, as it were, a Polybian tick: ever so tentatively, Walbank points to the new
Rome and to its inevitable eclipse.147 The recurrence of this motif, moreover, is
not just the product of Walbank’s unusual opportunity for hindsight, ‘of
knowing how the [scholarly] play ended’. In another passage of his ‘Problem
of Greek Nationality’, he in fact anticipates his own subsequent review:

143
1963a: 11, 1974b: 28–9, 1970a: 301, 1972a: 54, 86–7, 178, and esp. 180–1. The characteri-
zation of a ‘great’ statesman recalls Walbank’s opening description of Aratus, 1933: 1 (‘his
significance he attained not by forcing events into the shape he planned . . . ’).
144
Cf. Walbank’s discussion (HCP iii. 669–70) of the much-debated passage on Greek views
of Roman policy towards Carthage in the Third Punic War (Plb. 36. 9–10).
145
Walbank 1963a: 1, 1960a: 216, 1962: 8, 11. ‘Great act of courage’: 2002: 321. See also
Walbank’s reflection on the fifty years separating the first and second editions of the Cambridge
Ancient History, 1991/2: 113.
146
Walbank 2002: 1.
147
The same analogy between the US and Rome is drawn in the conclusion of 1964a, a lecture
(adapted from the third of his 1957 Gray Lectures at Cambridge: SCA D1037/2/1/11/9) with
which Walbank toured a number of US universities: ‘For this feature [the inheritance of the
mixed constitution], good or ill, we must, I suggest, reserve at least a part of our thanks or
execration for Polybius, whose essay on the constitution . . . has thus by a strange and unexpected
channel of transmission helped to shape the destiny of a people whose role in the modern world
is perhaps not altogether dissimilar to that of the Romans in theirs’ (p. 260).
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30 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

though the historian is apt to believe that the subject he has chosen for study is
one which he came to by chance, or because it seemed to have been neglected, or
because it arose out of some earlier work, or for some other wholly personal
reason, fifty years hence it will be quite obvious that the themes chosen by
historians today, and the treatment accorded to them, were directly related to
contemporary problems, or, to use De Sanctis’ words, to the spiritual needs of
men and women living in the middle of the twentieth century. (1951: 60)
Walbank’s narrative of his own early career in the Hypomnemata contains
further Polybian parallels.148 It plays repeatedly on the tension between his
‘two levels of interpretation’: the reconstruction of his own limited vision as
an agent in his own story; and his own vantage-point from beyond the story’s
end.149 In Walbank’s account, his early career turns on a small number of
crucial chances: his knowledge from a cigarette card that Peterhouse was the
oldest Cambridge college, for example; or his writing of an article elucidating
some lines of the Georgics on weaving, later cited as evidence that he was not
an ‘historian in disguise’ when he was appointed to the Liverpool Chair of
Latin.150 ‘I now know’, he wrote later of the twist that led him to take the
Classical side at Bradford Grammar School, ‘that chance and error play a
great part at all times in shaping one’s life and I do not regret at all that my
parents’ ignorance turned me into a classical scholar’.151 This pattern can be
seen in part in the context of Henderson’s thesis of his self-effacement,
Walbank’s ‘coolant irony for the actor-self ’s efforts to string together a
chosen path toward a settled goal or rational objective’.152 The parallel with
Polybius might suggest, however, a more providential form of Tyche guiding
his career—no matter how knowing or ironic the analogy might have
been.153 In a striking passage of a late article, Walbank finds that Polybius’
personal narrative, the genesis of his great work, is likewise founded on
a small number of ‘arbitrary and idiosyncratic features’: ‘an Aristotelian
philosopher’s obiter dictum on the rise of Macedonia154 . . . a generally

148
See Henderson in this volume, pp. 37–8 and n. 2. Its title, of course, refers further back in
his own career to the Hypomnemata of Aratus, though Walbank’s own grandfather’s memoir
was a crucial model: SCA D1037/1/1/9.
149
Cf. 1994: 29–30: ‘It is an observed fact that many historians have a strong inclination to
create some sort of overall structure or pattern for the events with which they are dealing’.
150
1992a: 85, 149. Georgics article: 1940b.
151
1992a: 65.
152
Henderson 2001a: 227.
153
Cf. his remark on Polybian tyche, 1972a: 65 (cf. 1972a: 165): ‘it is hard to resist the
impression that as he looked back on the remarkable and indeed unique process of Rome’s swift
rise to power, and recollected the words of Demetrius of Phalerum, he was led to confuse what
had happened with what was destined to happen, and so to invest the rise of Rome to world
power with a teleological character’.
154
Demetrius of Phalerum, cited at Plb. 29. 21. 4–6, observing that no one would have
believed the warning that in fifty years the name of the Persians would be obliterated; referred to
also at Walbank 1970a: 291, 1980: 41, 1993a: 22, 1994: 34–5.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 31

accepted Hellenistic belief in Tyche, and, probably, his family involvement
with Ptolemaic Egypt’.155
History, for Walbank, was likewise a matter of unintended consequences, of
swirling movements the shape of which would only become apparent to the
historian, and of practical men doing their best in the midst of these great
currents. His two earliest books, both biographical in focus, have strikingly
ironic endings. Philip V is the unwitting vehicle for Greek culture ‘to spread
along the paths of the legions to Rome, and so to the western civilisation that
grew up after her’.156 His life had been ‘necessarily a ding-dong struggle,
demanding a constant readaptation of both ends and means, in which chang-
ing circumstances again and again suggested new objectives’.157 Aratos sees
the roles of its two chief protagonists reversed: ‘Cleomenes the idealist and
man of action becomes a mere expression of one aspect of his age, without
significance for the future; Aratos, by keeping close to actual events and
situations, and letting these condition his acts, shapes the history of the
Greek people for a hundred years after his death.’158 The value of history is
not just a generalized one, ‘the enrichment of experience which comes from an
added understanding of all that is past in the present’, and nor can it be
narrowed to a search for insights into a specific contemporary objective159—
for the context for action changes from historical moment to moment160—but

155
Walbank 1994: 42; cf. 1972a: 2–3, 1963a: 6, 8, 12: ‘But a history is not necessarily the worse
because it is sustained by a conviction that it reveals a purpose; and perhaps without Demetrius
of Phalerum and Polybius’ belief that he had witnessed the unfolding of a superhuman plan there
would have been no Histories—certainly no Histories in the form we have them in today’ (p. 12).
156
1940a: 275: ‘But the clear logic of world movements emerges only from out of an infinite
variety of minor streams, a host of contingencies, conflicting ambitions and cross-currents: what in
the light of centuries proves all-important may be regarded as little more than an accident, or may
even pass unnoticed by the uncomprehending gaze of its contemporaries’. Cf. the ironic conclusion,
1984a: 100, that ‘the very process of [the Romans’] annihilating the Hellenistic kingdoms had
accentuated the conditions which made the survival of the republic impossible’, or the conclusion of
Walbank’s 1946 inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin, ‘The Roman historians on the Roman
Republic’, SCA D1037/2/1/7/1/1, p. 36 (‘history had become a profession divorced from politics. It
gained autonomy at a moment when it ceased to be possible for real political history to be written’).
157
1940a: 258. Cf. 1958a: 271 on the career of Dio (‘one of the most striking illustrations
within the field of ancient history of the extent to which any given political end lays limitations
upon the means which can be employed to achieve it, and further of the extent to which the
realities of political life and human nature themselves restrict the field of profitable action’),
1946c: 43, on Philip V.
158
1933: 166 (our italics).
159
See Walbank’s critique, 1954c: 102, of Michael Grant’s focus on the prevention of war: ‘It
is also arguable that the greatest service that history can render to those seeking to understand
the present lies in the general increase of awareness that comes from the study of any real
historical problem, rather than in a universal concentration on one selected issue. In short, to
prevent wars we should study not merely past wars, but history in general.’
160
Cf. 1984a: 71–2 on Hellenistic kings’ use of ‘a combination of force and cajolery in a
proportion which varied according to the location and strength of the city and the political
constellation of the moment’.
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32 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

‘also that wisdom which is the fruit of men partly like and partly unlike ourselves
meeting, and either solving or failing to solve, problems that are partly like and
partly unlike those which we ourselves have to face’.161 In this broader context,
in the ‘ding-dong’ struggle with its countless contingencies, moral judgements
are necessarily shaded.162 The historian balances delicately above the fray, aware
that his own work is historically contingent, that its meaning and motives will
only be clear in retrospect—and is therefore wary of being over-harsh in judging
previous writers similarly blind to their own context.163
The historian’s role—as reflected here through Polybius, De Sanctis, and the
ideal historian of the ‘Problem of Greek Nationality’—is clearly less directly
political than in Walbank’s earlier ‘political effusions’. It is arguably no less
powerful, however: a kind of romantic, moral calling. The choice of such high-
flown language might seem at odds with the practical orientation of much of
Walbank’s writing. (Though, as many of the passages cited above reveal,
Walbank was not above high-flown language himself.) Critically, however,
there need be no opposition between the down-to-earth, the practical, on the
one hand, and the loftily romantic on the other. For Walbank, the romantic
consists in the practical: the men who pioneered federalism without any
philosophical guide; the itinerant craftsmen who kept alive the legacy of the
ancient world; the buses, vans, and postal catalogues that bring the town and
country together and mark progress. The historian (in the consistent pattern
of his reviews) must be balanced and objective in his judgements, his work

161
1951: 60. Cf. his characterization of the utility of history according to Thucydides, 1990:
254–5 (history was useful, ‘not, it is true, in providing a series of formulae or blue-prints for
future generals and statesmen, but certainly in giving his readers an extension of that generalised
experience which, as von Fritz puts it, enables a ship’s captain—or, one might say, the driver of a
car—to know the right thing to do in a particular emergency’), or in a lecture, ‘How Democracy
Began’ given Sept. 1957, SCA D1037/2/1/10/1, p. 18 (‘noone would be so foolish as to use our
experience of democracy at Athens to provide a blue-print for modern practice or a prognosti-
cation as to how modern democracy is likely to turn out. . . . But, even so, the story of Greek
democracy is valuable to us, not perhaps to incite us like certain politicians of the eighteenth
century to revolutionary action, but rather to emphasise and illustrate in a smaller context what
are still important problems which democracy has to solve . . . it remains one of the essential
objects of study for anyone who is concerned with the problems that confront modern
democracy.’).
162
See e.g. 2002: 321, 1984b: 224 on Pyrrhus; cf. his early characterization of Polybius’
‘moralist’s view of history’, 1938: 58: ‘to him history is a storehouse of moral examples, a training
for life’s vicissitudes. Sensationalism obscures the moral issues, inaccuracy of detail puts the later
events in their wrong perspective, neglect of cause and effect ruins the whole moral scheme.
Polybius was a firm believer in the power of Fortune (Tyche) to bring a man the destiny he had
earned; the historian had only to sift the details carefully and patiently—the bald record of what
was said and done—bring out the nexus of cause and effect and the moral lesson would emerge,
clear for all to see.’
163
See e.g. his judgement, 1967: 692–3, of Plutarch, ‘this warm, shrewd, but mediocre writer’,
whose ‘enviable myopia [concerning Rome and the possibility of historical change] . . . goes a
long way towards accounting for the unruffled kindliness that is his most attractive characteris-
tic’; cf. 1964a: 241 on Polybius, 1983c on Hieronymus of Cardia.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 33

‘anchored in facts, free from abstraction and generalization, and with no axe to
grind’.164 But he should also take positions, ‘[feel] passionate and . . . not
shrink from battle’.165
In a series of passages through his work, Walbank identified similar aspects
to Polybius. ‘When one has cleared away the jejune moralising, the didacticism
and the stilted and creaking metaphysics’, he wrote in a paper in 1946, ‘there is
something solid and valuable beneath . . . a firm conviction that history is a
thing that matters, a rational study in which one asks questions and obtains
answers, and uses the knowledge gained to enrich and inform one’s own
experience.’166 Polybius’, unlike Herodotus’, was only an ‘apparent candour’,
that of a man ‘who has persuaded himself of the truth about matters in which
he has a strong personal commitment, and is not prepared even to envisage
the possibility that there may be another point of view’.167 Comparing himself
with Odysseus—‘a grand, if slightly humourless, comparison’168—reveals ‘dis-
guised beneath the didacticism of the practical historian . . . a glimpse of a
romantic’.169 Polybius’ polemics also reveal hidden depths:170
We are apt to think of Polybius as a didactic and even prosy writer. His long
passages of polemic, properly read, enable us to correct that picture and to see
something of the strong emotional background which coloured his attitudes and
probably gave him the impetus to carry through his great enterprise to a success-
ful conclusion.
It must remain a non liquet, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that for
Walbank too an equivalent emotional background was similarly fundamental,
in allowing him to conceive and to carry through his great enterprise.

After Walbank, what now for Polybius? Recent years have seen a new surge of
interest: with a wave of new volumes (both specialist studies on particular
themes and works of synthesis or introduction), and a series of important

164
1959a: 217 on Syme’s Colonial Elites; see also 1954b: 51 on Holleaux; contrast 1968: 253
(‘L. is not the kind of scholar who believes that a good way to exercise historical objectivity is to
hold the balance level between good and evil’).
165
1964b: 211–12 on Gomme; cf. 1963a: 2 on Holleaux’s passion. Contrast 1958b: 157 on
Cloché (‘His honesty is exceeded only by his caution; and this combination can sometimes be
somewhat paralysing’).
166
‘Polybius and the growth of Rome’, SCA D1037/2/3/21/3, pp. 30–1, continuing ‘Polybius saw—
and said—that if history was not this, it was nothing. It is in this that his claim to greatness lies.’
167
1972a: 6.
168
1972a: 52, including the suggestion that Cato’s mockery of Polybius’ attempts to restore
honours to the Achaean exiles as akin to Odysseus going back for his hat from the Cyclops’ cave
(Plb. 35. 6. 4) may have been a pointed rejoinder to such self-comparisons.
169
1948a: 171–2; Walbank himself compiled a list of his travels, year by year: SCA
D1037/2/5/15.
170
1962: 12.
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34 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

conferences leading to published collections.171 Although older problems, as
Walbank himself observed in 2002, have ‘remained uppermost in discussion’,
it is possible to divine a number of trends in recent work.172 It is clear, first,
that interest in Roman imperialism has rarely been more intense.173 With his
position between Greece and Rome, as an imperial subject who came to
identify with imperial power, Polybius provides a singular case study for
further work, for example drawing on post-colonial approaches, or relating
our characterization of ancient imperialism to modern debates.174 As Wal-
bank himself recognized in his 2002 review of (late twentieth-century) Poly-
bian scholarship, recent work has shown an increasing interest in rhetoric and
narrative—though he added the balancing note that this new approach, ‘is
basically less novel than it might appear to be’.175
This volume looks both back, in appreciation of past scholarship; and
forward, looking for new answers to old questions. A number of contributions,
for example, examine the intertextual relationship of Polybius’ work with
others—Phylarchus (Marincola), Aratus of Sicyon (Meadows), Zeno of
Rhodes (Wiemer), or Xenophon (Gibson)—or Livy’s use of Polybius as a
source (Briscoe). Others take a fresh approach to Polybius’ position between
Greece and Rome (Thornton, Sommer), follow Walbank in contrasting the
responses of Josephus and Polybius to Roman power (Gruen), or offer con-
trasting approaches to one of the most familiar Polybian questions, that of
Polybius’ account of the Roman constitution in Book 6 (Erskine, Seager).176
Still further contributions, influenced by narratological perspectives, trace
narrative patterns in Polybius’ work through close analysis of particular
sections: the Mamertine crisis (Champion), the youth and last years of Philip

171
Guido Schepens and Jan Bollansée’s 2001 Leuven conference, leading to Shadow of
Polybius (2005); the 2008 conference in memory of Peter Derow, which sought to complete
his unfinished project on ‘Rome and the Greeks’, Smith and Yarrow 2012; an important 2010
conference on Polybius, organized in the Helmut-Schmidt-Universität in Hamburg by Volker
Grieb and Clemens Koehn. For conferences before 2000, see the brief survey of Walbank 2002:
3–4.
172
Walbank 2002: 1: ‘on the one hand Polybius’ views of his own craft, his methods of
composition and the content and purpose of his work and, on the other, his explanation of how
and why Rome had been so successful, together with his own attitude towards Rome and her
domination since 168 b.c.’
173
Studies of Roman imperialism which have drawn on Polybius include volumes by
Champion 2004a, Erskine 2010, and most recently Baronowski 2011, published too late for
consideration in this volume.
174
For a survey of recent comparative work, see Vasunia 2011. Cf. the emphasis on imperial-
ism in the edited collection of Smith and Yarrow 2012.
175
2002: 9, continuing (pp. 9–10): ‘The good critic has always known that behind a historian’s
account lie assumptions and aims directly related to his predecessors, to his contemporary
situation and (if he is a public figure like Polybius) to his own political career, his present stance
and his future ambitions; also that literary presentation can affect the emphasis of his narrative.’
A recent, innovative approach to Polybian narrative is McGing 2010.
176
For a survey of earlier work on Book 6, see Walbank 2002: 14–17.
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F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 35

V (McGing, Dreyer), the role of the Roman prokataskeuē in Books 1 and
2 (Beck), or Polybius’ characterization of Boeotia in Book 20 (Müller). Two
chapters look at Polybius through a wide Mediterranean context, exploiting
the wealth of source material Polybius offers to the economic historian
(Davies) or drawing on Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’
to reconsider Polybius’ use of synchronisms and the geographical coming
together of Mediterranean history (
ıºŒ).177 One area of potential re-
search not covered is the rich reception history of Polybius—with one excep-
tion, the reception of Polybius by Frank Walbank himself. Beyond this
introductory chapter, two very different contributions bookend the volume:
the first a detailed account of the genesis of the Polybian commentary, by John
Henderson; the second an insight into the personal context in which the
commentary was developed, by Frank’s daughter Mitzi.
What of the future direction of Polybian scholarship? Based on the direc-
tion of current work, we can speculate with some confidence: that the empha-
sis on Polybian narrative strategies will intensify, perhaps with literary
commentaries on some individual books; that there might be a greater con-
centration on Polybius’ intellectual context, his engagement with contempo-
rary debates;178 that the religious ideas of the Histories, Polybius’ ‘creaking
metaphysics’ might be reassessed, in the light of new approaches to Greek
religious belief;179 or that there might be a renewed interest in issues of identity
and the representation of cultural difference within the text.180 Given recent
explorations of the commentary as a genre, and given the extensive archive of
papers that might support such a project, a fuller analysis (as called for by John
Henderson below) of ‘the research methods, rhetorical strategies, or archival
economy embodied’ in Walbank’s commentary might also be likely.181
How our current interests are shaped by contemporary concerns beyond
academe we may only guess. However, with a recent experiment in political
union reeling, the gap between the ‘rich and the starving’ extending ever
further, and the ideal of a humane scholarship facing renewed threat, fifty
years hence we can expect that readers will have continued to look, with profit,
to both Polybius and Walbank.

177
On ‘imagined communities’, see Anderson 2006, and Quinn in this volume. On the

ıºŒ, the starting-point is of course Walbank 1975. Walbank reserved particular praise
for the approach of Clarke 1999 (2002: 8, 25).
178
Cf. 1948a: 175–81.
179
See Walbank’s comments, 2002: 7.
180
See esp. Erskine 2000.
181
See below, p. 39. Davies 2011: 346 n. 44 notes the absence of discussion of Walbank from
e.g. Gibson and Kraus 2002, Most 1999.