For Polybius, the historian must be a man of affairs; he must have experience in politics and war; and he must be a painstaking researcher who has gained historical knowledge by direct observation of important sites and from the cross-examination of eyewitnesses. Polybius consequently felt that the only history worth writing was contemporary history. Along with Thucydides he set politics and warfare as the subject matter for history. The discipline of history would not emerge from these strictures until the twentieth century.
Polybius was born near the end of the third century B.C., when the political independence of the Greek states was about to come to an end, as the Romans began to assume hegemony over the Mediterranean basin. He belonged to the aristocratic elite of the Greek city of Megalopolis, a powerful member of the Achaean Confederation of Peloponnesian Greek states. His father, Lycortas, had served as strategos, the highest political office in the confederation. Polybius's early career was distinguished, and his honors were many and rapid: he carried the remains of the great Achaean statesman Philopoemen at the latter's funeral in 182 B.C.; he was selected as an envoy for a diplomatic mission to the Ptolemaic court in Egypt in 181-180 B.C.,
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