Ebook: A Historical Commentary on Polybius, Vol. 1-3

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957, 1967, 1979. 799 + 697 + 850 pp.


From author:
The last full commentary on Polybius, that of lohannes Schweighaeuser, was published during the French Revolution ; but his eight massive volumes, which also contain a text and translation, are fundamentally untouched by the stirring events going on at the time—except that in the last two the author, hitherto described as Argentoratensis, has suddenly grown conscious that he is also ciuis Gallo-Francus. The work appeared between 1789 and 1795, and the Lexicon Polybianum followed the next year. It is in essence a product of eighteenth-century scholarship, and a noteworthy one, not least because it marks a major stage in the reconstitution of the text; but it is especially in the commentary that Schweighaeuser’s gifts come out most clearly. The more one works with this, the more one comes to admire its thoroughness and sound common sense. Again and again Schweighaeuser is right where his successors are wrong ; and it does not in the least detract from his achievement to admit, as one must, that his commentary no longer satisfies current needs, For this, one reason is of course that the work of Nissen, Hultsch. and Büttner-Wobst has radically transformed the text, especially in the fragmentary books; but, more important, there has been a shift in interest since Schweighaeuser’s 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 preeminently those who share his own interests.
It is these readers whose needs the present work is intended to meet. It is to be completed in two volumes. The second volume in fact goes down only to the end of book xviii (which affords a logical break after the Second Macedonian War) and a third volume will cover books xx to xxxix.