Polybius, the Mixed Constitution, and Roman Conquest

• In Event: Ancient History as Political Theory

Abstract

The sixth book of Polybius's Histories ends with a remarkably austere example of Roman resoluteness: the city's refusal to ransom its captured soldiers after Cannae. Of all the books of Polybius's Histories, the fragmentary sixth has had the longest afterlife in the history of political thought, particularly for its famed depiction of the cycle of regimes but also for its portrait of the Roman mixed constitution as slowing the natural process of political decay. Unlike the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of regimes, which focus principally on domestic arrangements, but like the Thucydidean one, which centers on foreign policy, Polybius explores the thematic question of the regime with regard to war, specifically Rome’s remarkable conquest of the oikoumene in fifty-three years. The paper examines the Polybian vision of the constitutional sources of Roman success in war, which include not only institutional arrangements but also an account of how institutions interact with human political psychology, and, finally, how Roman political culture supported its institutions. It raises the question of the extent to which we can speak of Polybius as not simply as a historian but also as a political philosopher, given his programmatic interest in the regime.

Author

• Seth N. Jaffe, LUISS Guido Carli University