Polybius

Polybius

Polybius (; Greek: Πολύβιος, Polýbios; c. 200 – c. 118 BC) was a Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He is noted for his work The Histories, a universal history documenting the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries BC. It covered the period of 264–146 BC, recording in detail events in Italy, Iberia, Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Africa, and documented the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars among many others. Polybius's Histories is important not only for being the only Hellenistic historical work to survive in any substantial form, but also for its analysis of constitutional change and the mixed constitution. Polybius's discussion of the separation of powers in government, of checks and balances to limit power, and his introduction of "the people", all influenced Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the framers of the United States Constitution.The leading expert on Polybius for nearly a century was F. W. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Polybius has received more than 1,671,320 page views. His biography is available in 69 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 68 in 2019). Polybius is the 8th most popular historian (up from 9th in 2019), the 44th most popular biography from Greece (down from 40th in 2019) and the 3rd most popular Greek Historian.

Polybius is most famous for his book The Histories, which is a description of the rise of Rome from the end of the Second Punic War to the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War.