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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 Liverpoolin July 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the firstvolume of Frank Walbank’s Historical Commentary on Polybius. It mightinstead have commemorated other milestones: the completion (if not thepublication1) seventy-five years before of Walbank’s Aratos of Sicyon; or—still further back—his introduction to Polybius, when as an 18-year-oldschoolboy in 1927 he was asked by his teacher, Ned Goddard, to translateand précis ‘a small, rather grubby German school edition’ (in the phrase usedin Walbank’s own unpublished memoir, the Hypomnemata).2 Above andbeyond any such dates, of course, the conference was intended not to honourany particular volume but rather the man behind them. Frank Walbank wasunable to attend the conference in person, but he discussed with us our plansfor the conference, he opened the proceedings with a video message (printedbefore this introduction), and he was able to read a number of the papers. Hedied on 23 October 2008. Together with the contributors to this volume, andmany more, we remain hugely grateful for his support, for his example, andfor his scholarly legacy.

There can be no modern scholar more closely associated with an ancientauthor than Walbank with Polybius. As Polybius made his life’s work thetelling of the story of ‘by what means and under what form of constitutionthe 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 publicationsunless 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 asubsequent memoir, ‘Summary of years 1946–1977’: SCA D1037/2/3/21/57.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/2/2013, SPi

inhabited world to their sole government’ (Plb. 1. 1. 5), Polybius and his worldwere Walbank's life and work.3 In addition to the 2,357 pages of distilledscholarship which make up the three-volume Commentary, the monographson Aratus and on Philip V which were the stepping-stones to it, and hisrevisions to Paton’s Loeb edition (now emerging, but which for a long timeseemed to have ‘run into the sand’4), his numerous articles which range overHellenistic history and Greek historiography, even if they do not feature thename of Polybius in their titles,5 are frequently rooted in interpretations ofhis text. ‘Perhaps the day will come’, wrote one approving reviewer of PhilipV,6 ‘when Mr Walbank, as he matures, will attempt a general view, and give tothe general public (what his learning qualifies him to give) a picture of thatHellenized eastern Mediterranean into which Rome moved, and with whichRome fused, during the second and first centuries B.C.’ That too he dulyaccomplished, through his Fontana History, The Hellenistic World, and (formore scholarly readers) through his contributions to the histories of Macedo-nia and the Hellenistic volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History which heco-edited.7

Whatever disagreements might be had over details, and no matter thatsome of his earlier publications—written, it should be remembered, aroundthree-quarters of a century ago—reflect the concerns and agendas of theirtime,8 it is clear that, if any scholar’s output can be said to represent more thanthe sum of its parts, Walbank’s can. His achievement, in the words of onerecent assessment (that of John Davies), was to ‘[bring] Polybios out of thespecialist side-channels into the mainstream of historiography . . . to make histheme and period . . . into one of the central stories of Classical Antiquity,and . . . to set the gold standard for a historical commentary on a Classicaltext’.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 GreatTrinity 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 andmistakes, but should praise and admire them, considering the times they lived in, for havingascertained 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 SCAD1037/2/3/9/46, a letter to Oswyn Murray dated 24 Aug. 1988.


2 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison

later writings are peppered with modest acknowledgements of how his viewshad been altered by subsequent work, or of his appreciation of the greatercomplexity of a given topic11—for, as he says of Polybius, ‘no man can remainentirely the same for fifty years’12—, there is also an extraordinary consistencyin his work, both in terms of the themes addressed and the manner of theirtreatment, a consistency which conveys the sense almost of a sustainedprogramme.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 thatit took Rome less time, according to Polybius, to achieve world hegemony—fifty-three years—than FWWhas had to polish off theHistories’13, and the samepoint was made by Walbank himself in the context of Book 6.14 It was also theresult of an extraordinary doggedness, an eye for detail, and ‘ship-shape organi-zation’—traits reflected also in his dealings with publishers, and the organizationof his papers15—as well as the difficult personal circumstances from whichPolybius provided a refuge.16

It also required imagination—the imagination, first, even to conceive of ascholarly enterprise, such as the commentary, on so grand a scale and withsuch a consistent format. (Although the first volume of A. W. Gomme’scommentary on Thucydides was published in 1945, only a year after Walbankhad agreed to undertake Polybius, his ostensible model in early discussionswas How and Wells’ Herodotus.17) The leap of imagination required was allthe more extraordinary given the wartime context. As Kenneth Sisam ofOxford University Press wrote to him in announcing that the delegates‘have agreed to encourage’ the commentary, ‘It is good to think that in thesetimes 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 himwas not a restful experience. When he sat at his desk that outpouring of energy became mentalfocus 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 numberof volumes of commentary required: ‘This work is planned to be in three volumes’ (Gomme1945: v).

18 See below, p. 53. Subsequently Walbank himself expressed regret that the pressure imposedfor immediate publications ‘makes scholars less inclined to take on work likely to occupy severalyears’ (2002: 2).


F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 3

Imagination was also required to set Polybius and his Histories so painstak-ingly within their setting. An understanding of the physical context of ancienthistory, first, was fundamental both to Walbank’s own evolution as a historianand to his historical approach. The cruise on which Walbank first visitedGreece 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 inthe Greek world.19 ‘[S]tudents [of ancient history]’, he wrote later, ‘should all(ideally) have made their own periegesis of some Mediterranean land.’20 Hisearliest work, Aratos of Sicyon, is replete with references to the geography ofmodern Greece, the result of a Leaf Travelling Studentship awarded by hisCambridge college in 1932.21 (‘From the top [of Pentelicon]’, he wrote in hisreport on his travels, ‘there is as much to be learnt about Greek history as fromweeks of Bury.’22) In his reviews of others’ work, sketch-maps and illustrationsof topography are always welcomed, though ‘carelessness in matters of topog-raphy may seem more venial’.23 As he enjoined his students, ‘Unless oneknows Greece as is, constantly making false pictures. Need of a consciouseffort 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 ofeither:25

We habitually ask from ancient historians what we have no right to ask—namelythat 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 Mediterraneanlandscape that control the way of life of its inhabitants’. Cf. Polybius own emphasis on the needfor 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 theeasier 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 ofthe shield at Marathon is lifted from the realm of fable, and becomes a possibility, if nothingmore.’ 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 ofHannibal’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 recurrentconcern with the route of the Via Egnatia, e.g. 1977c, 1983a, 1986 (see also ‘The Via Egnatia: itsrole in Roman strategy’, SCA D1037/2/3/9/19/1).

25 1948a: 164, foreshadowed in an unpublished lecture ‘The Reliability of Polybius’, delivered18 June 1946, p. 7 (SCA D1037/2/1/5/1–2); cf. 1943c: 79 (‘to demand complete consistency inPolybius’ use of technical language is to invite disappointment’), 1972a: 117–24. See also hiscritique of J. O. Thomson, 1949b: 361, for his lack of sympathy for his subject-matter, ‘littlepatience for the past myths and follies of mankind, for its confusions of thought and errors ofjudgement . . . he seems almost to apologize for mentioning such obvious nonsense’.



contours of a large-scale Austrian Staff Map. Polybius had not the advantage ofsuch a map, nor his readers either. For them, a long list of barbarous place namescould 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 historicalactors to the broader movements to which they were contributing (discussedbelow), 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 asa ‘struggle for Greek unity’, he supposed that ‘today . . . such an approach toGreek history must seem strangely out-of-date . . .mainly important to ustoday as a reminder of how much our preoccupations as historians maylater be seen to have reflected contemporary issues’.26 (His own approach tothe question, though it was indeed coloured by contemporary concerns—aswe shall see—nevertheless in many ways anticipated much subsequent schol-arship on Greek identity.27) Walbank also—as befits a historian working onPolybius—had a clear vision of history as a dialectical process; or as he put itmore graphically: ‘Studying history does not mean absorbing the past as if onewere drinking coffee.’28 With retrospect, it is easy to see how the themes ofGreek federalism, of Achaean resistance to the looming ‘cloud in the west’, or afocus 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 awillingness to develop analogies to contemporary history, or to reveal his ownpolitical 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 historyappears to have been influenced by his own vivid apprehension of certain contemporary eventsin Europe’), or on the interest of South African historians, 1953a, in the ‘broad question of howmen 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 somesense 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. 9–10below, 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 theLeague of Nations Union in 1930–1 at Cambridge, 1992a: 108. During a seven-week stay in Jenain 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 the1930s, he joined the Communist party, was Hon. Sec. of the Merseyside branch of the NationalCouncil for Civil Liberties (active in writing to local papers to counter National Union of Fascistspropaganda), and was Chairman of the local branch of the Left Book Club. For his reading in thisperiod, see below, n. 33.



F. W. Walbank, Bassae (1936)


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

The work in question covers, at least prima facie, a wide historical range: inchronological order, an unpublished paper ‘Social Revolution at Sparta’(1935), a short piece published under the pen name ‘Examiner’ asking ‘Isour Roman History Teaching Reactionary?’ (1943a), ‘The Causes of Greekdecline’ (1944), his short book The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West(1946a), and a contribution to The Cambridge Economic History of Europe onthe late Roman economy, completed in the same period as The Decline of theRoman Empire, but published only in 1952.32 It is quickly apparent, however,that these pieces all develop a common approach and a common historicalthesis—an approach and a thesis which drew on (his response to) contempo-rary events and to a whole discourse on civilization and its decline whichdominated the inter-war years.33 ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’ may lookprimarily 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 factthe 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 hasalways 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, seeSCA D1037/2/3/15. By Walbank’s account, 1992a: 97, a crucial role in introducing him to theideas 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 ofdiscussion 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 theWest: ‘later, of course, we all threw off these ideas and many other semi-mystical notions towhich 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 Toynbeefeature in his discussion of the reception of the mixed constitution in his third 1957 GrayLecture, SCA D1037/2/1/11/9, p. 332 (Polybius ‘among the distant progenitors of OswaldSpengler and Dr. Toynbee’), though cf. its published version, 1964a: 34–5. The intensity andbreadth of Walbank’s engagement with contemporary events can be gauged by his year-longWorkers’ 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 onevents 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 Walbanklocates the achievement of de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World in ‘itstreatment of two developments of magnitude—the destruction of Greek democracy from 400 bconwards 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.



problem themselves form a commentary upon the ages that proposed them’.35

‘The Causes of Greek Decline’ begins with Ser. Sulpicius Rufus’ evocation ofthe death of the cities of Greece in his letter of consolation to Cicero on the lossof 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 Greecemeant, a dead lake lapping about the foundations of dead cities. In that tragicdecay—which was not confined to mainland Greece—we are confronted with oneof 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, politicaland spiritual upheaval, even before the bombs began to turn our own cities intoshattered ruins.37

The causes of decline, whether Greek or Roman, lie deeply in the structure ofsociety: the ‘social relation of the classes’, the ‘contrast which underlay ancientcivilization, between the leisured class of the city and the multitude labouringto support it on the land’, and the failure of the middle classes to extenddemocracy.38 The foundation of classical civilization on slavery and exploita-tion allowed for ‘brilliant minority civilization[s]’: so, for example, the ‘citizenof fifth-century Athens felt himself to be the member of a compact, brilliant,exclusive, and highly conscious community, which was, in fact, living largelyat the expense of the resident alien, the slave and the subject ally’.39 But therewas a price to pay.

The pattern of class division led, first, to an ideological cleavage, a contrastin 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 alonemight have enabled them to preserve their freedom from outside conquest’.41

And the class system also brought about a stagnation in the kind of technicaldevelopment that could have triggered an industrial revolution—and which,in turn, would have allowed for ‘mass civilisation, and also the concentration

35 1946a: 1. 36 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 further1992a: 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 theconfessed 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 toactual policies.’

40 1946a: 24. Contrast Rostovtzeff 1941: 1311–12, seeing the lack of Greek unity as putting astop on creativity.

41 1944: 11: ‘. . .where the artistic achievement of the Athenian Acropolis was made possibleonly by a tyrannous imposition exacted from unwilling subjects, what hope was there of unity?And what meaning was there in freedom?’



of the proletariat in factories and mines under conditions which enabled it toattain a community of purpose and a realisation of its own strength’.42

There were sparks throughout antiquity of social revolution43—a termwhich he justifies at length in his 1935 lecture.44 These, however, werecomfortably suppressed. First, through bread and circuses, in other words byputting a plaster over the situation. Secondly, through more aggressive action:by ‘strengthen[ing] the instruments of the State’—what he refers to (in thecontext of later Roman empire) as the ‘Corporative State’.45 (‘Rigid statecontrol’ then undermined the successful laissez-faire approach to economicactivity of the early principate—with the Diocletianic price edict standing as asymbol of the transformation.46) And, finally, through what Walbank refers toas a ‘cultural failure’, by ‘the implanting of beliefs and attitudes convenient toauthority’. Plato is a particular villain here, guilty—for his recommendation ofreligion as a means of social control in the Laws—of ‘the blackest treason tothat flowering of the human spirit which we call Hellenism’. But subsequentphilosophy is likewise condemned for narrowing its focus with ‘a commonnote 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 andcultural correspondence’ with modern fascism:48

Both institutions represent an attempt to force a decaying social system tocontinue working at the expense of the happiness and freedom of the masses ofthe people. Both cater for the luxury needs of a fortunate minority, while forcingthe rest to accept scarcity and hardship as their natural portion. Both go togetherwith cultural decay, a decline in rationalism and scientific thought, and thefostering 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 arejoinder to the much more negative and conservative use of the term by F. R. Leavis, author ofthe notoriousMass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930). Walbank was taken fortea 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 Economicsand 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 aminority culture, tended to be aggressive and predatory, its claim to autonomy sliding overinsensibly, 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.



reformer Cleomenes III as ‘unconsciously . . . foreshadowing the developmentand 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; letfreedom be defined as the right to do as one is told . . . it is no mere accident thatwe find both here and in modern Germany appeals to an imaginary golden ageunder Lycurgos or the ancient Germanic heroes; emphasis on agriculture as afirm basis for the state; marshalling of the young in military fashion; carefulorganisation of thought through propaganda and censorship; rooting out ofunsympathetic elements from the state by the employment of proscriptions andassassinations; the subordination of the individual to the state and an aggressivenationalism which rejects the claims of any greater unit than the national state.

Was this pattern of decline—first into fascism, then atrophy—an inevitableone? When it comes to the ancient world, the answer is uncertain. ‘The SocialRevolution at Sparta’ suggests that there was an antidote to Greek decline(addressing the underlying social problem, extending democracy) but that itwas one which was out of their reach. (‘What no-one offered, because no-oneknew how to offer it, was a solution that would have given the workman a fairreturn for his labour, that would have removed the gap between the rich andthe starving, and would have enabled a united and contented Greece to faceRome without class-warfare for ever striking her in the rear.’50) ‘The Causes ofGreek Decline’ suggests more emphatically that a solution was impossible inantiquity, projecting its hopes onto the later adoption of a classical legacy.Even in the western half of the Roman empire there was never a completebreak, in turn allowing for an ancient legacy to be the basis of a form ofliberation in the modern world (but at what point?):51

Consequently, when the barbarian invasions were themselves events in thedistant past, and new towns began to spring up in Europe, inhabited by neitherserfs nor slaves, the techniques of the ancient world were there for men to buildon. 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; thereare forces of capital and large scale industry behind modern fascism that simply did not exist in3rd century Sparta.’ The portrayal of Cleomenes in Walbank 1933 is markedly less negative; seealso 1966a for the argument that Polybius saw Cleomenes as tyrannically undoing, rather thanreturning to, the Lycurgan constitution; his account of Cleomenes’ revolution, 1984b: 458–9, alsocontains 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 artisansand traders in the towns, local markets, itinerant craftsmen, the villages around the manor or themonastery, 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-termtransmission of a classical heritage (the idea of monarchy) see, with variations, 1983d: 20, 1984a:100.



passed their knowledge down from father to son. And so once more, in anatmosphere free from the deadening effect of the ever more rigid class-systemof late antiquity, men could go forward to the mastery of nature. With themthey bore the full cultural legacy of the ancient world, adapted now to a taskfrom which antiquity itself had necessarily drawn back, but which gave promiseof easy accomplishment to the new and fruitful partnership between mindand hand.

In the modern world, by contrast, there was no inevitability to fascism anddecline, 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’ ofeconomic growth, and above all ‘the will and the capacity [of the workingclass] to take over the organization of society in order to transform it into anequalitarian community’—were all entirely new.52 ‘Hence we have no reasonto regard as our inexorable lot a stagnating, latter-world Byzantinism, restingon a rigidified industry, with industrial barons offering, gangster-like, the onlyresistance 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 oldproblems are being solved.’54 In particular, the explosion of material evidenceremoves the historian’s dependence on literary sources, making it possible ‘forthe first time . . . to turn a microscope on the ancient world’. The effects of thison knowledge of the ‘social man of antiquity’ are ‘the greatest revolution in theclassical studies of the last sixty years’.55 When ‘Examiner’ asked the question‘is our Roman history teaching reactionary?’, it was not a question whichlooked long for an answer. ‘Three years of war have clarified a good manyissues . . .The war has forced us to take sides.’56 And so it is crucial thatschoolboys should be able to distinguish in their understanding of Romanhistory 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 weonly ‘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 ofindustry to ‘export itself ’, 1946a: 28, 78, exemplified by the migration of cotton manufacturefrom 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 1943a: 57. 57 1943a: 60–1.



schools might do better to stick to mathematics.’58 And it is not the case thatschoolteachers are inadvertently failing to pick up on a more enlightenedconsensus: ‘Our present attitude towards the history of the late republic andearly empire is largely a legacy from an age and a class which are nowthemselves part of history’. History needs to be rewritten from a perspectivefree of class divisions—and, as he wrote in the aftermath of war, the humanistand the historian brought together, in an alliance both ‘offensive and defen-sive’, within a renewed Classics in which ‘we draw no frontiers’.59 ‘Cicero mustno longer be forced into the pattern of the Victorian statesman. We muststudy him and read him against his own background and try to judge him byhis own standards and criteria. We must be conscious of how strange theGreeks and Romans were, how different from, as well as how like ourselves.’60

The drive here to resolve the various dissonances between work and worldis very clear. If we all espouse values of democratic openness, we must teachaccordingly. It is not just, however, that the study of the past should be alignedwith contemporary values. The conclusion of Decline of the Roman Empire inthe West is that ‘it is our duty . . . to exert every sinew against the tendencies inour own society which resemble those predominating in the late Empire . . . ’.61

The unique problems of the contemporary world demanded an educationtailored to them. AsWalbank asked in a post-war lecture ‘Science, History andthe Atomic Bomb’, written in the context of the new Education Act: ‘Whatkind 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?’ Theanswer: ‘Must be a combination of science and humane studies’.62 Scienceprovided 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 BradfordGrammar 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 onthe Roman Republic’, SCA D1037/2/1/7/1/1, p. 3 (‘The Humanities are of their essence the wholestory 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) aswell 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 aseries on citizenship (though history) for the Durham County Community Service Council inSept. 1938. The final lecture concludes with questions over ‘the future of our liberties’, SCAD1037/2/1/3/1:

Conclusion:—there is an attack on our libertiesDefence—vigilance and agitation: unity.

Context: that of wide-spread fascism [illegible reference to Ulster Unionists, 1913]Burning of Papers—HitlerChamberlain—?

Duty of Citizen to safeguard his rights, to watch over those on whom authority is conferred.62 SCA D1037/2/1/9/1/7.



one should resist an obscurantist reaction against scientific culture—and yetscience 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 ofour own civilization is conceived as an alternative to ‘solacing ourselves withthe 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 andresults, not to pass ethical judgements on individuals and policies. And let usavoid like the plague superficial analogies with the fundamentally differentcircumstances of the modern world. (1943a: 61)

And yet it can scarcely be claimed that Walbank here avoids moralizinghimself. ‘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 ‘aprice to pay’ for its expansion; ‘the provinces found themselves obliged toshoulder the whole burden of an extravagant oligarchy and an unnaturallyswollen 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 thetechnical progress that offers the modern world its defence against fascism—suggest an answer: your analogies are superficial, mine are not. A similarcontradiction appears when it comes to the idea of the ‘topical’. The contribu-tions to (the first edition of) the Cambridge Ancient History of Oertel ‘conformto an old-established tradition for discussing the decline of Rome . . . he hasapproached it as a topical question, relevant (as all history must in the long runbe relevant) to the issues confronting us in our times’.66 It is not clear whereOertel’s fault lies: would the lessons only emerge later? In approaching the fallof 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 demorale et une échelle des valeurs, à resoudre les problèmes d’organisation sociale et à determinerles principes d’une vie raisonable, toutes questions sur lesquelles la culture classique a toujoursson mot à dire’); the war, fought for western humanistic values, had had the ironic effect ofsubordinating the humanities to ‘des études ayant un rapport plus immediate avec les besoins dela 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.



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’ takesas its starting-point Rostovtzeff ’s question:67 ‘Is it possible . . . to extend a highercivilisation to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting itsquality to the vanishing point? . . . Is not every civilisation bound to decay assoon as it penetrates the mass?’ It is a question he answers by inverting it:68 it isonly by penetrating the mass that civilizations can survive. And yet what wouldthis ideal civilization, based on a ‘partnership of mind and hand’, look like? Itwould be basedfirst on values ‘towhich to-day . . .we all necessarily subscribe’:69

We believe in the virtue of free thought and discussion, in coming to conclusionson the basis of objective evidence, in deciding our courses of action through theoperation of an informed democracy: we are against the autocratic rule of a groupor an individual, we reject dogmas (such as racial teaching) based on emotion, apriori assertions that must not be tested, ‘inspired’ truth as the controller ofscientific investigation. If anyone doubts that we have made up our minds aboutthese values, let him consider the fact that 99.99 per cent. of the people of thiscountry are ready to fight on in an increasingly conscious struggle against theFascist enemy who denies them all.

At the same time, there is also a harshness—born of harsh times—in both therhetoric of scientific (and historiographical) progress and in the picture ofsociety that is conjured up. ‘In one way or another’, Walbank claims, ‘our ownsociety has incorporated within its texture all that matters of classicalculture . . . ’.70 But when one looks for culture, the emphasis throughout ison the practical, suggesting perhaps an unease over high culture: ‘Buses,bicycles and trains bring the villages to the town; the postal catalogue, thewireless, the van, and the cinema bring the town and city to the village.’71 Ifthis failure to realize a cultured mass civilization counts as an aporia it is oneshared by his contemporaries. On the threshold of war, Louis MacNeice askedand answered Rostovtzeff ’s question in similar terms:72

. . . It is so hard to imagineA 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 Fascistsand 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 itclaims liberty of speech to-day only in order that it may destroy it the moment it achieves thepower 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.



A fall in the standard of intellectual livingAnd nothing left that the highbrow cared about.

Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinkingThat, if you give a chance to people to think or live,

The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougherAnd not return more than you could ever give.

This wartime period was, unsurprisingly, the high-water mark of Walbank’sefforts to find direct political lessons in antiquity. As John Henderson hasdiscussed,73 notwithstanding the fact that his work on Polybius ‘always turnedon 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 effacehis own political engagement, an engagement which had had the ironic effectof disqualifying him from active service in the war against fascism.74 Just asPolybius was ‘kidnapped, for History’,75 so Walbank chose henceforth to‘[abide] by the depersonalizing regime of the commentary within the asceticorder 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 forthe times, ‘not objective history as the historian understands it’.77 He alsoappears to undercut his own ‘political effusion[s]’, by juxtaposing reports ofhis lectures or publications with more momentous historical events, VE Dayor the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.78 As Henderson characterizesWalbank’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 updepriving him of a war, of all the histrionic rush and proving of self. His(substitutive) efforts to mobilize historical writing and Classics get neatlymocked by the planetary enormities of thermonuclear detonation . . . ’.79

This narrative of Walbank’s rejection of an earlier more direct politicalengagement through history-writing, of his ‘[smoothing] away obsolescentand 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 themesof ‘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.



subordinated to a conventional historical narrative free of more than passingreferences to contemporary events.81 What was appropriate for the lecture hallwas not appropriate for a first monograph. The Decline of the Roman Empirein the West was a different kind of book for a different audience. (And thesame holds true of his later work: retrospective essays allow for a kind ofreflection not possible within commentary.)

Another way of putting this would be Walbank’s own: academic work, onthe one hand, and political activity on the other were two worlds—‘almost liketwo separate forms of existence’ ‘temporarily brought together’: through thefigure of (the Swansea professor) Benjamin Farrington, or through the corre-spondence with Piero Treves which moved effortlessly between the two.82 In aletter of 30 May 1942, for example, Treves dreamed of a post-war Italy: ‘—afree, liberated, decent and European Italy—, where Frank will be coming tolecture at our Universities on things Greek, Mary to inquire into the condi-tions of the Italian workers, and the children to enjoy Italian landscape, artand cooking.’ As this mirage suggests, however, it was Mary Walbank whowas the more actively political of the two: he ‘had the academic’s inclinationto talk and discuss and then to leave it at that: for Mary a conclusion was thefirst step to action.’83 With gradual political disillusionment, Mary’s periodicill-health, and an academic career that became increasingly engrossing, thetwo worlds of academic work and political activity may well have divergedfurther.84

At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that the roots of Walbank’s laterwork lie precisely within this explicitly political phase. This is most clearly trueof Walbank’s long-standing interest in federalism: a concern which reachesback to the 1930 prize essay which launched him on the M.V. ThéophileGauthier to Greece, and onto his career. This was the very year that he hadjoined 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 agenuine idealism’ (p. 86).

82 Two worlds: 1992a: 153, 166; cf. p. 187 for Farrington’s invitation to Walbank in 1943 towrite 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 allprevious points of reference’ (1992a: 173); cf. p. 188 (‘I was still a Marxist (of sorts)’, in thecontext of the latest ‘contemptible’ shift of Communist policy, their reversal of their attitude tothe 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 ofGilbert Murray, who had spoken to the Bradford Grammar School ‘Sixth Classical’ when he wasin Bradford for a League of Nations Union meeting (1992a: 74), and who lectured on theHellenic Travellers’ Cruise, 1930 (1992a: 105). For Murray’s League of Nations activities, seeStray 2007: esp. pp. 217–37.



special reference to its development in Hellenistic times’ already directlyexploits the parallel between ancient and modern:86

To the modern student this conception of Federalism and its practical applicationis of intense interest, since it is to a form of Federalism that Europe is todaylooking as a remedy for its misfortunes . . .And so it is well that we should at thesame time recognise that it is to Greece that we owe our original conception offederal government; that it was in the Achaean League that men whose patriotismwas far more local, and so far more intense than ours, first learned to sacrifice thatpatriotism for the good of a greater body.

Walbank’s subsequent reading in the thirties included researches into thewidest variety of forms of political organization: in Celtic Ireland, Polynesia,and pre-Roman Italy, among other societies.87 After the war, however, thestudy of ancient federalism became no longer just a search for a betteralternative but also a form of inquest. So, in the concluding lecture of his1945–6 course on World Affairs:88 ‘The problem of peace. Why did we fail1918–39? Growth of Nazi Germany! Yes, but why was the LN inadequate?Because the big nations would not shelve national authority.’ What of thefuture? ‘Towards world organisation? Is a world state possible or desirable?What would be the transition? Federation? In Achaea, Switzerland, USA.’ Atthis 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 thelimited sense that it was in this period that the commentary was initiated.Walbank’s memoir gives the impression that the choice of Polybius as thesubject of a commentary was almost serendipitous.89 But this is probablymisleading.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 hadbeen 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 aproject, he adds, the design of which was based on ‘rigid exclusion of allprejudice, 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, D1037/2/4/1/3–5for associated paperwork. Compare the second lecture of Walbank’s 1938 Durham County serieson citizenship, SCA D1037/2/1/3/1, asking whether the ‘voluntary liquidation of states’ waspossible. See also 1935, ‘Social Revolution at Sparta’, p. 3 (on the debt of modern federalorganizations to the Achaean League and Aratus), p. 9 (on the Achaean League as ‘theinstrument 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.



evidence, its lively style, and above all in its essential humanity, it stands out asa triumphant assertion of that European scientific tradition which admits nofrontiers of race, language, or creed’.91

As is clear from these examples, such projects—and we may suppose, theidea of the Polybian commentary—were attractive because they embodiedvalues, not because they were free from them. As his reviews of wartimeGerman scholarship make clear, the idea of a scholarship tainted by ideologyis not just an abstract construct. ‘It is sincerely to be hoped that G. willeventually publish his proposed continuation of this study under conditionswhich no longer encourage the pernicious irrelevancies of Rassentheorie.’92

Similarly he lampoons the underlying narrative of Stier’s Grundlagen und Sinnder griechischen Geschichte:93

Ultimately, S’s interpretation of Greek history rests on a mystique, that of theindogermanic-nordic soul, with its unique collection of virtues . . . the chief amongthem being love of freedom. Greek history is the story of the clash between theinnate European idea of freedom and the idea of order, which the Greeks took overfrom the Aryans of Asia, who had absorbed it from the soul of that continent. Thisconflict between freedom and order, after many vicissitudes, was eventuallyresolved by Christianity on the inner plane of the individual conscience.

At the same time, however, even a work which took a more enlightened cuefrom contemporary events (Schachermeyr’s Alexander der Grosse), modellingits historical protagonist negatively in the light of the recent phenomenon ofNational 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 ahistory that wore its topicality on its sleeve, it also exerted a contrary force:heightening, rather than diminishing, the appeal of a scholarship conductedfor its own sake, that could express humane values untainted by ideology. (Torespond appropriately to the topicality of one’s subject was to tread a peril-ously narrow path.) This model of humane scholarship, however—though itmay have been idealistic—was never woolly. Walbank revealed an instinctivedistrust 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 thePapyri (‘The present volume is a monument . . . to the integrity of purpose which, at the outset ofthe 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 Affairscourse 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.



only reinforced in this period.95 In the aftermath of the war, for example, hethrew himself into the rebuilding of scholarly links across Europe,96 but as hedid so he resolutely distanced himself from any bombast. ‘A conference on“the universal value of humanism”’, he began a paper to the Rome meetingof 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 insistedlater, ‘was to create canons of clarity and relevance, and to discipline thewriter’.98 Without this faith in scholarship, how else could Walbank have goneon writing and publishing, in the depths of war, such distilled scholarly piecesas ‘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 inhumane scholarship. To ask how he could have conceived such a plan inwartime is on one level misconceived: the war itself helped to generate thescale 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 iswhy he ever thought to suggest any other work (Tacitus’ Histories)? Theminimalist explanation is that Tacitus’ Histories was suggested to him as atopic (in 1943) by his mentor, and at the time Head of Department, JamesMountford. Despite Mountford’s powerful influence, however, this minimalistexplanation for a choice of topic is part of a pattern in Walbank’s narrativewhereby all his academic choices are subject to chance—a pattern belied by theintensity 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 andWalbank 1946, Walbank 1950d, and the evidence of his correspondencewith Louis Robert, SCA D1037/2/6/1/20/52, 54, 55, 56, in which Robert gave a list of wartimeFrench scholarship.

97 1950d: 112, 116, continuing to ask: ‘in short, if we cannot—as we assuredly cannot—havethe whole cake, whether we cannot have a half, a quarter, or at least some fragment, which mayawaken 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 ahistory sponsored by a special International Commission for a History of the Scientific andCultural 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 thestudents of the Socialist Society in a post-war lecture, SCA D1037/2/1/9/1/2, ‘Warning: Don’tbecome “party” man in a narrow sense (—of any party!). Join parties if you think they are rightbut—don’t pretend they are infallible. Infallibility is a religious claim not a political one. Don’tsurrender your power of judgement.’

99 1942a; an article appreciated by Louis Robert in their post-war correspondence (‘précieuxpour 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 Delphicoracle) 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 ofMacedonia was a desideratum’, p. 151). Walbank undertook considerable preliminary researchon Tacitus’ Histories in this period, although it is not clear whether this antedates Mountford’s



suggest some alternative answers. Although the decline of Greece and thedecline and fall of Rome are envisaged as parts of the same story, Greek declineis no more than the first act; in turning to the Decline of the Roman Empirein the West, on the other hand, he would turn his attention to the end ofthe story. Secondly, although this may seem remarkable in the light of hissubsequent achievement, he may well have had an intrinsic preference for theprincipate over the Hellenistic world as a historical period. Although itcontained 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 ofancient history, the question of decline—Walbank conceived of the earlyempire in mostly positive terms, the high-point of a laissez-faire approach toeconomic activity, a successful political compromise.101 By contrast, ‘Any-thing that follows Demosthenes’, he wrote of Hellenistic history in 1943, ‘mustseem an anti-climax—though not, of course, without its own interest andsignificance’.102 When Tacitus was thought to be spoken for, he reverted toPolybius, the historian of Greek decline and fall, so that when word came fromSyme, in neutral Turkey, that Tacitus was in fact free, his choice was irrevers-ible.103 Walbank’s 1943 piece ‘Polybius on the Roman Constitution’ showsvery clearly the bridge between ‘The Causes of Greek decline’, on the onehand, and the commentary on the other: Polybius was unable to see the‘contradiction in the very structure of second-century society . . . ; his wholeupbringing combined to prevent his coming to terms with it’. He was attractedto the idea of anacyclosis as he struggled to deal with the ‘shadow of comingdisaster thrown already over the internal history of Rome by the accumulationof foreign conquests . . . ’.104 With only a little hindsight, the choice of Polybiuscould 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 Delphicoracle 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 theweaknesses which lay beneath the façade of early imperial prosperity. But it is equally unrealisticto neglect the achievements of the first two centuries of the principate and the relative success ofAugustus’ 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 fromwithin to the rulers of an empire now unchallengeable from without, the herald of approachingochlochracy’. Cf. McDonald and Walbank 1937 on Roman imperialism, ‘Polybius and theGrowth of Rome’ (summarized as Walbank 1946d), SCA D1037/2/3/21/3, pp. 30–1: ‘Polybiuswas blind to some of the most essential features of the scene, because he was obsessed with thepresuppositions of the circle from which he sprang, and its counterpart among which he lived atRome; his blacks were too black and his whites too white. And when at last the facts of changeintruded upon his notice, his solution was to superimpose the pessimistic theory of theanacyclosis, to substitute perpetual movement for perpetual immobility—but in a form whichequally ruled out the idea of progressive development.’



published, as he noted, in a series entitled Problemi d’oggi), ‘there are fewancient writers whose work has the same immediate claim upon our intereststoday. POLYBIUS writes about things we have all known, Italians notleast . . . ’.105

Even after this point, even as the urgent topicality of the ‘causes of Greekdecline’ becomes sublimated in commentary, it is clear that Walbank’s con-cern to relate his work with the world did not evaporate. As Momigliano laterobserved, of the three Persons of the Trinity (Syme, Jones, andWalbank) ‘evenin Jones the concern for the modern world was less pressing and explicit thanit was and is for Walbank’.106

Far from being left to moulder on the shelves, for example, The Decline ofthe Roman Empire in the West was reissued in expanded and revised form in1969 as The Awful Revolution, a title that consciously echoed Gibbon.107

‘[T]he strident immediacy of the original gave way to a more scholarlytone’;108 further reading sections are added, and the corporative State is re-branded as the Authoritarian State. It is worth pausing, however, over whatremained: 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 onexploitation; its final injunction to the reader to focus his or her energies on theamelioration of modern society, and—in general—the whole thesis of socialinequality and ‘stagnation of technique’ leading to authoritarianism and collapse.The question of whether a savage fascism inevitably awaits modern Europe isbroadened (pp. 114–15). The common trend in the Late Empire and themodernworld is not towards fascism per se, but

from an age of laissez faire to one of control and state planning. From this point ofview—whatever their other differences—there is a common element in theregimes 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 issometimes asked) witnessing a new and ominous stage in our civilization inwhich we must all gradually sink into a state of regimentation similar to thatwhich 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 speculatinghow 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’ inch. 38 of Gibbon 2004: iv. 175–6: ‘This awful revolution may usefully be applied to theinstruction of the present age.’

108 Davies 2011: 343; it was still, he adds, ‘a serious essay in historiographical theory, offeringa fully worked-out Marxist analysis of the “Decline and Fall”’.



It may be said quite decisively and at once that there is no such necessitywhatsoever driving the world of the twentieth century towards authoritariantyranny.

The reason again is found in the different economic conditions of ancient andmodern society. In short, the political call of the Decline of the Roman Empirein the West is not muted but refreshed. As late as 1983, he described de SteCroix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World as a book ‘which goes to theheart of some of the most important problems confronting students of theancient world’—whilst maintaining positions from his Decline of the RomanEmpire in the West.109

The same pattern is evident inWalbank’s adaptation of his original remarkson the ‘barbarian peril’ in the modern world. In 1946 a more confident pictureis presented of barbarism at bay, with a memorable quotation from anotherpassage in Gibbon’s ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire inthe West’: ‘The plough, the loom and the forge are introduced on the banks ofthe Volga, the Oby and the Lena, and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes havebeen taught to tremble and obey.’110 If barbarian peoples still pose a danger, itis only by virtue of their gaining material civilization and so the technicalmeans of threatening civilization—with Japan cited as an example of thedangers of ‘too readily assuming that technical civilisation necessarily involvesall-round culture’.111 By 1969 faith in civilization is less pronounced, and thepotential 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 saynothing of the jet fighter and the hydrogen bomb—are sufficient guarantee thattheir owners will also automatically exhibit a high degree of civilization? . . .Asalutary and painful lesson has taught us that barbarism in this sense remains adanger at all times, and in all societies, and that the price of civilization, like thatof freedom, is eternal vigilance.113

Walbank no more recants his views on inequalities in the Greek world thanon 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. Seealso 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 todo justice to the importance of slavery as a cause of decline, reiterating the arguments ofWalbank 1946a, but then conceding ‘this is merely one point, singled out largely because itinterests 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.



Address to the Classical Association (CA), a lecture which returned to thepaper with which he had first addressed a CA ‘Annual Assembly’, at St Albansin 1944, ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’.114 His captatio benevolentiae gentlymocks his youthful self, explaining the genesis of the original paper in terms ofits wartime context. Quoting the response of Frank Adcock, then Professor ofAncient 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 ‘fieldin which the Hellenistic age can be justly said to have made a more positivecontribution’, the experiment in Greek union of the Achaean League. And yethe 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—thatthe 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 Greekcivilisation, the technical stagnation of the Hellenistic age, and the failure of theGreeks generally to extend their culture downwards to reach the masses ofthe poor . . . [Professor Adcock] was perfectly right: it was one-sided—thoughI thought (and I still think) it was an important side.

In an earlier version of the Presidential Address, a paper ‘The PoliticalContribution of the Achaean Confederacy’ given in June 1967, he invokesan argument reminiscent of ‘The Social Revolution at Sparta’: by leaving thesocial problem ‘suppressed and unsolved’, the Achaean League ‘had thussaddled itself with a liability which was to play a significant part in the finaldebâcle’.116

Moreover, when Walbank turned back to Greek historical narrative, in hisFontana history of the Hellenistic world (first published in 1981), it is strikinghow much of the pattern of ideas of his early ‘political’ phase shines through.The Fontana history achieves, arguably, a kind of marriage between thepolitical and apolitical styles of the mid-thirties to mid-forties. Long-standingsocial problems were ‘endemic in Greece for many centuries’: ‘a low livingstandard, the absence of any margin to meet lean years or upsets due tomobilization and war will have played a large part in reducing peasants to acondition 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’sMarxist 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 theAchaean confederacy to solve the social problem’) in conclusion, 1970b: 26, but then insists onfinishing 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.



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 ofPtolemaic Egypt significantly also makes the connection with the conditions ofthe later Roman empire and—without invoking the spectre of fascism—isclearly reminiscent of the corrupt obscurantist Corporative State:120

The power that the Crown has lost has fallen into the hands of the priests and ofcertain influential individuals, whose ability to offer protection . . . to runawaysand others in distress seems to anticipate the conditions of the declining Romanempire half a millennium later. For this collapse of Ptolemaic rule there are manycauses, some of which have been examined above, but to those must be added adisastrous foreign policy, the loss of markets abroad, the wastage caused byinternal unrest and civil wars, incompetent government at home, bureaucraticcorruption and currency depreciation. In considering the whole sorry tale it isdifficult not to echo the judgement of E. Will that Ptolemaic Egypt fell a victim toits 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 withother earlier formulations121), Walbank seeks to balance the picture, just as hehad done in his CA Presidential Address. ‘[The] flame of rational enquiry hadbegun to burn low and we can detect a growth in the attraction of mysteryreligions and eastern cults’, though the Hellenistic age is also said (in the samesentence) to have ‘remained a time singularly free from obscurantism andcensorship . . . ’.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 discoveriesto the practical use of human communities and the achievement of materialprogress’.124 As in his earlier work also, the decline of Greece is set within agrander, 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 1948when I told FrankWalbank that (Soviet) Russian reviewers of his books, though thinking that hisattempts at being a coherent Marxist were not very successful, had a healthy respect for hisscholarship.’

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 contributionto Western Europe cannot omit the achievements of the Hellenistic Age’, or the positivedefinition of the Hellenistic world (focusing on the exchange of ideas, prosperity, and thelinguistic 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 inrespect 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.



aspects of the Hellenistic world lived on’, to enjoy a ‘ghostly existence inByzantium’.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 thepossibility of transcending the limitations of size and relative weakness of theseparate city-state. But time ran out.’126

Walbank’s concern with the topical survives in the repeated analogies to themodern world scattered through his work: in references to Chairman Mao,Smuts, the Vietnam peace talks, Red Square march-pasts, working men’sclubs, or (less passingly) to comparisons between ancient and modern feder-alism (‘No ambassadors travel abroad from Pennsylvania, Wyoming signs notreaties’127). Such analogies are more than just decorative. The 1970 CAPresidential Address justifies the topic of federalism in terms of its contempo-rary importance, albeit more guardedly than in the grand opening of TheDecline of the Roman Empire in the West (‘So perhaps its role in the Greekworld may seem to be not entirely without topical interest’128). He makes thisclaim despite knowing, he adds, that ‘it is unpopular and even thought to beslightly 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 appearmore obliquely. A common pattern is for such contemporary relevance to beprojected onto others—even as Walbank guards himself against simplisticassociations between ancient and modern. His survey of Polybian studies inthe last quarter of the twentieth century, for example, found that ‘it is hard todissociate [the remarkable post-war surge of interest in Polybius] entirely fromthe contemporary clash of powers and the rise of the United States to pre-eminence, which were to dominate the next fifty years’.129 Similarly, theopening 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, identifywith 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 ismore immediately relevant to these post-war years, when Dion and Heracleides are still familiarfigures in a liberated Europe’.

129 2002: 1. For a similar litotes, see 1964a: 260 (the roles of the US and Rome ‘not altogetherdissimilar’). Cf. Walbank’s observation (1944: 10) on Rostovtzeff 1926: ‘The comparison withBolshevik Russia and the ancient world in decay is constantly implicit in his narrative, andfrequently he pauses to draw a direct analogy’.

130 HCP i. vii.



The last full commentary on Polybius, that of Iohannes Schweighauser, waspublished during the French Revolution; but his eight massive volumes . . . arefundamentally untouched by the stirring events going on at the time. . . .Hiscommentary is primarily philological; whereas most people who read Polybiustoday turn to him as the main source for much Hellenistic history, as thehistorian of the Punic Wars, and, above all, as the first man who really came togrips with the problem of the rise of Rome to world empire—which is equivalentto 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 theRevolutions, the stirring events, the problem of world empires, which entitlesus to claim to share Polybius’ interests’.131 Here is the claim of ‘The Causes ofGreek Decline’, that the events of the decline of Greece have ‘a special signifi-cance for our generation’, recapitulated. History-writing is not overshadowedby the enormity of surrounding events; it draws its power from them.

Nevertheless, it is particularly in the context of discussions of the historian’srole that a sense of the historian’s proper commitment reveals itself. A crucialfigure 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 as1943 in the conclusion to ‘Is our Roman History Teaching Reactionary?’‘Properly told’, the Roman republic could be a tale ‘damning to the enemiesof liberty and democracy’:133

It is no mere accident that Gaetano de Sanctis, perhaps the most eminent Romanhistorian of our generation and a great liberal thinker, broke off his Storia deiRomani abruptly at 167 b.c., never to complete it. His last volume, published in1923, when Fascism had been in power for a year, is dedicated—who can read thewords to-day unmoved?—‘to those few who disdain alike to be oppressed and tomake themselves oppressors’. The story that De Sanctis could not finish inMussolini’s Italy it is our task as teachers of Roman history in a democraticcountry to tell.

The implicit contrast here between De Sanctis’ abrupt halt at 167 bc andPolybius’ own decision (3. 4) to continue writing Roman history after 167 bc isa powerful one, but it is mitigated by Walbank’s own claim that such history isstill 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 swearthe 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 apostcard dated 10 Nov. 1945, SCA D1037/2/6/1/20/58; Walbank subsequently went to DeSanctis’ door in Rome (and met him briefly), in Sept. 1949 (pers. comm., April 1998).

133 1943a: 61.



collected papers in 2002. The essay is in part a defence of Polybius from DeSanctis’ charge that he was a quisling of Rome—clearly a charge for De Sanctisborn from his personal circumstances, and a recurrent concern for Wal-bank.134 At the same time, however, it is difficult to resist hearing echoes ofWalbank’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 moreforgiving of Polybius, even as he points towards the dangers of using endsto justify means, he aligns himself with De Sanctis’ moral perspective onhistory:136

His deep sense of humanity and hatred of injustice and oppression would haveprevented De Sanctis from ever supposing that ends—whether regarded as aimsor, retrospectively, as the results of the historical process—can justify means. Butto 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 andcivilisation, we should, I think, not forget—as De Sanctis did not forget—the cruelfate of Numantia and the severed hands of Uxellodunum.

De Sanctis is also a key inspiration behind one of Walbank’s most emphaticmethodological statements (from his much cited article, ‘The Problem ofGreek Nationality’)—a statement, if not of the historian’s duty to makemoral judgements, at least of his or her duty to make full use of the advantageof hindsight. Walbank makes a distinction between two levels of historicalinterpretation. The first level of interpretation is to ‘investigate the variouspolicies and aims of Greek and non-Greek statesmen, the interests likely toinfluence them, the actions of the various states, and their outcome, in terms ofthe concepts and ideals and knowledge actually available to the peopleconcerned’.137 It is essential, he continues, however, that the historian goesbeyond 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 ofCleomenes 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 latergenerations. One need not make an anachronistic theory of Greek unity one’s touchstone inorder 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 thenationalism which could not advance beyond the city (just as so far we have failed to advancebeyond the nation state) as particularist. If the historian is concerned with the whole story hemust assign responsibility in this way: if on the other hand his task is merely to assess the positive



[He] is also living in his own age, with all the advantages of knowing how the playended; and he can see each act in relation to the whole.138 Now because of whatDe Sanctis has called the ‘creativity of history’ its process is not a mere series ofpermutations 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 outstandingindividuals, the unthinking obedience or the revulsion of the mass, the victories,defeats, migrations, conquests, and settlements, the social struggles, the shiftingcurrents 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 isneither a haphazard nor an arbitrary creation but stands in a logical sequence toall 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 practicalPolybius. A function of the prevailing ideology of contempt for manual workwas, according to ‘The Causes of Greek Decline’, ‘the diversion of scientificthought away from practical experiment . . . into notional and metaphysicalchannels’.139 Walbank’s laudatory account of the Achaean League, in his CAPresidential Address, climaxes with the observation ‘And all this was done bypractical politicians who owed virtually nothing to political theorists’.140 Simi-larly, just as Polybius resists the temptation to arouse an emotional response inhis reader,141 so he later summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of (a laterstudy by) Stier by describing it as an ‘extremely interesting, if somewhatemotionally 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 ownstandards.’

138 Walbank’s analogy of history and drama goes back to his prize essay on federalism, SCAD1037/2/4/1/2: one result of the modern interest in federalism (p. 1) is that ‘the curtain hasceased to fall upon the spectacle of Greek history with the death of Alexander, but the play hasbeen prolonged to a truer if less dramatic climax in the rout of Scarpheia and the burning ofCorinth’.

139 1944: 15; he also portrays expenditure on festivals, as opposed to ‘capitalist and industrialexpansion’, as ‘going into unproductive channels’. Cf. Plb. 9. 20. 5–6, cited at 1972a: 124: ‘Istrongly disapprove . . . of any superfluous adjuncts to any branch of knowledge such as serve butfor ostentation and fine talk . . . and I am disinclined to insist on any studies beyond those thatare 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 in1960a: see now Marincola in this volume.

142 1963a: 7, discussing Stier 1957. Statesmen too, not least Philip V, are regularly assessed forthe degree to which they are mastered by their emotions, e.g. 1940a: 260, Hammond andWalbank 1988: 219 (‘Demetrius occupied the throne of Macedonia . . .without ever disciplininghis restless nature to the pursuit of a single consistent policy, or deciding whether to concentraterealistically on ruling Macedon effectively or to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of a universalempire’).



which Polybius claims to ‘defend high principle’, Polybius’ identification withRoman imperial expansion, his ‘ruthless’ acceptance of the means employed(‘success was apt to be his main criterion’), and his lack of sympathy for thosecaught up in its progress are plainly a concern:143

One thing worries me a little. Polybius’ commitment to the doctrine of ‘thepossible’ is no doubt a praiseworthy quality in a statesman—even though thereally ‘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 ahistorian? 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 onmethodology and approach,and at risk of being fanciful, it is also possible to trace a more delicate, implicitrelationship between these two co-dependent historians. Given Polybius’ fa-mous opening statement, it is striking how frequently the figure of fifty yearsfeatures in Walbank’s own work. De Sanctis’ ‘great act of courage’, the work ofSchwartz, his own study of Greek nationality, the development of Holleaux’sthesis, are all reviewed after half a century—in each case to consider (in aparallel 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 surgein interest in Polybius and contemporary affairs—‘the contemporary clash ofpowers and the rise of the United States to pre-eminence, which were todominate the next fifty years’146—suggests that this fifty-year trope is morethan, as it were, a Polybian tick: ever so tentatively, Walbank points to the newRome and to its inevitable eclipse.147 The recurrence of this motif, moreover, isnot just the product of Walbank’s unusual opportunity for hindsight, ‘ofknowing how the [scholarly] play ended’. In another passage of his ‘Problemof 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 (‘hissignificance 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 viewsof 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 alsoWalbank’s reflection on the fifty years separating the first and second editions of the CambridgeAncient 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) withwhich Walbank toured a number of US universities: ‘For this feature [the inheritance of themixed constitution], good or ill, we must, I suggest, reserve at least a part of our thanks orexecration for Polybius, whose essay on the constitution . . . has thus by a strange and unexpectedchannel of transmission helped to shape the destiny of a people whose role in the modern worldis perhaps not altogether dissimilar to that of the Romans in theirs’ (p. 260).



though the historian is apt to believe that the subject he has chosen for study isone which he came to by chance, or because it seemed to have been neglected, orbecause it arose out of some earlier work, or for some other wholly personalreason, fifty years hence it will be quite obvious that the themes chosen byhistorians today, and the treatment accorded to them, were directly related tocontemporary problems, or, to use De Sanctis’ words, to the spiritual needs ofmen and women living in the middle of the twentieth century. (1951: 60)

Walbank’s narrative of his own early career in the Hypomnemata containsfurther Polybian parallels.148 It plays repeatedly on the tension between his‘two levels of interpretation’: the reconstruction of his own limited vision asan agent in his own story; and his own vantage-point from beyond the story’send.149 In Walbank’s account, his early career turns on a small number ofcrucial chances: his knowledge from a cigarette card that Peterhouse was theoldest Cambridge college, for example; or his writing of an article elucidatingsome lines of the Georgics on weaving, later cited as evidence that he was notan ‘historian in disguise’ when he was appointed to the Liverpool Chair ofLatin.150 ‘I now know’, he wrote later of the twist that led him to take theClassical side at Bradford Grammar School, ‘that chance and error play agreat part at all times in shaping one’s life and I do not regret at all that myparents’ ignorance turned me into a classical scholar’.151 This pattern can beseen 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 achosen path toward a settled goal or rational objective’.152 The parallel withPolybius might suggest, however, a more providential form of Tyche guidinghis career—no matter how knowing or ironic the analogy might havebeen.153 In a striking passage of a late article, Walbank finds that Polybius’personal narrative, the genesis of his great work, is likewise founded ona small number of ‘arbitrary and idiosyncratic features’: ‘an Aristotelianphilosopher’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 inhis own career to the Hypomnemata of Aratus, though Walbank’s own grandfather’s memoirwas 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 tocreate 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 swiftrise to power, and recollected the words of Demetrius of Phalerum, he was led to confuse whathad happened with what was destined to happen, and so to invest the rise of Rome to worldpower with a teleological character’.

154 Demetrius of Phalerum, cited at Plb. 29. 21. 4–6, observing that no one would havebelieved the warning that in fifty years the name of the Persians would be obliterated; referred toalso at Walbank 1970a: 291, 1980: 41, 1993a: 22, 1994: 34–5.



accepted Hellenistic belief in Tyche, and, probably, his family involvementwith Ptolemaic Egypt’.155

History, for Walbank, was likewise a matter of unintended consequences, ofswirling movements the shape of which would only become apparent to thehistorian, and of practical men doing their best in the midst of these greatcurrents. His two earliest books, both biographical in focus, have strikinglyironic endings. Philip V is the unwitting vehicle for Greek culture ‘to spreadalong the paths of the legions to Rome, and so to the western civilisation thatgrew 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 seesthe roles of its two chief protagonists reversed: ‘Cleomenes the idealist andman of action becomes a mere expression of one aspect of his age, withoutsignificance for the future; Aratos, by keeping close to actual events andsituations, and letting these condition his acts, shapes the history of theGreek people for a hundred years after his death.’158 The value of history isnot just a generalized one, ‘the enrichment of experience which comes from anadded understanding of all that is past in the present’, and nor can it benarrowed 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 worsebecause it is sustained by a conviction that it reveals a purpose; and perhaps without Demetriusof Phalerum and Polybius’ belief that he had witnessed the unfolding of a superhuman plan therewould 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 infinitevariety of minor streams, a host of contingencies, conflicting ambitions and cross-currents: what inthe light of centuries proves all-important may be regarded as little more than an accident, or mayeven 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 hadaccentuated the conditions whichmade the survival of the republic impossible’, or the conclusion ofWalbank’s 1946 inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin, ‘The Roman historians on the RomanRepublic’, SCA D1037/2/1/7/1/1, p. 36 (‘history had become a profession divorced from politics. Itgained 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 illustrationswithin the field of ancient history of the extent to which any given political end lays limitationsupon the means which can be employed to achieve it, and further of the extent to which therealities 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 understandthe present lies in the general increase of awareness that comes from the study of any realhistorical problem, rather than in a universal concentration on one selected issue. In short, toprevent 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 aproportion which varied according to the location and strength of the city and the politicalconstellation of the moment’.



‘also that wisdomwhich is the fruit ofmen partly like and partly unlike ourselvesmeeting, and either solving or failing to solve, problems that are partly like andpartly unlike those which we ourselves have to face’.161 In this broader context,in the ‘ding-dong’ struggle with its countless contingencies, moral judgementsare necessarily shaded.162 The historian balances delicately above the fray, awarethat his own work is historically contingent, that its meaning and motives willonly be clear in retrospect—and is therefore wary of being over-harsh in judgingprevious writers similarly blind to their own context.163

The historian’s role—as reflected here through Polybius, De Sanctis, and theideal historian of the ‘Problem of Greek Nationality’—is clearly less directlypolitical than in Walbank’s earlier ‘political effusions’. It is arguably no lesspowerful, however: a kind of romantic, moral calling. The choice of such high-flown language might seem at odds with the practical orientation of much ofWalbank’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 theone hand, and the loftily romantic on the other. For Walbank, the romanticconsists in the practical: the men who pioneered federalism without anyphilosophical guide; the itinerant craftsmen who kept alive the legacy of theancient world; the buses, vans, and postal catalogues that bring the town andcountry together and mark progress. The historian (in the consistent patternof 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 forfuture generals and statesmen, but certainly in giving his readers an extension of that generalisedexperience which, as von Fritz puts it, enables a ship’s captain—or, one might say, the driver of acar—to know the right thing to do in a particular emergency’), or in a lecture, ‘How DemocracyBegan’ given Sept. 1957, SCA D1037/2/1/10/1, p. 18 (‘noone would be so foolish as to use ourexperience 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 Greekdemocracy is valuable to us, not perhaps to incite us like certain politicians of the eighteenthcentury to revolutionary action, but rather to emphasise and illustrate in a smaller context whatare still important problems which democracy has to solve . . . it remains one of the essentialobjects of study for anyone who is concerned with the problems that confront moderndemocracy.’).

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 trainingfor life’s vicissitudes. Sensationalism obscures the moral issues, inaccuracy of detail puts the laterevents 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 hadearned; the historian had only to sift the details carefully and patiently—the bald record of whatwas 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 along way towards accounting for the unruffled kindliness that is his most attractive characteris-tic’; cf. 1964a: 241 on Polybius, 1983c on Hieronymus of Cardia.



‘anchored in facts, free from abstraction and generalization, and with no axe togrind’.164 But he should also take positions, ‘[feel] passionate and . . . notshrink from battle’.165

In a series of passages through his work, Walbank identified similar aspectsto Polybius. ‘When one has cleared away the jejune moralising, the didacticismand the stilted and creaking metaphysics’, he wrote in a paper in 1946, ‘there issomething solid and valuable beneath . . . a firm conviction that history is athing that matters, a rational study in which one asks questions and obtainsanswers, and uses the knowledge gained to enrich and inform one’s ownexperience.’166 Polybius’, unlike Herodotus’, was only an ‘apparent candour’,that of a man ‘who has persuaded himself of the truth about matters in whichhe has a strong personal commitment, and is not prepared even to envisagethe possibility that there may be another point of view’.167 Comparing himselfwith Odysseus—‘a grand, if slightly humourless, comparison’168—reveals ‘dis-guised beneath the didacticism of the practical historian . . . a glimpse of aromantic’.169 Polybius’ polemics also reveal hidden depths:170

We are apt to think of Polybius as a didactic and even prosy writer. His longpassages of polemic, properly read, enable us to correct that picture and to seesomething of the strong emotional background which coloured his attitudes andprobably 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 forWalbank 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 ofinterest: with a wave of new volumes (both specialist studies on particularthemes 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 tohold the balance level between good and evil’).

165 1964b: 211–12 on Gomme; cf. 1963a: 2 on Holleaux’s passion. Contrast 1958b: 157 onCloché (‘His honesty is exceeded only by his caution; and this combination can sometimes besomewhat paralysing’).

166 ‘Polybius and the growth of Rome’, SCAD1037/2/3/21/3, 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: SCAD1037/2/5/15.

170 1962: 12.



conferences leading to published collections.171 Although older problems, asWalbank 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 hisposition between Greece and Rome, as an imperial subject who came toidentify with imperial power, Polybius provides a singular case study forfurther work, for example drawing on post-colonial approaches, or relatingour 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 andnarrative—though he added the balancing note that this new approach, ‘isbasically less novel than it might appear to be’.175

This volume looks both back, in appreciation of past scholarship; andforward, looking for new answers to old questions. A number of contributions,for example, examine the intertextual relationship of Polybius’ work withothers—Phylarchus (Marincola), Aratus of Sicyon (Meadows), Zeno ofRhodes (Wiemer), or Xenophon (Gibson)—or Livy’s use of Polybius as asource (Briscoe). Others take a fresh approach to Polybius’ position betweenGreece and Rome (Thornton, Sommer), follow Walbank in contrasting theresponses of Josephus and Polybius to Roman power (Gruen), or offer con-trasting approaches to one of the most familiar Polybian questions, that ofPolybius’ account of the Roman constitution in Book 6 (Erskine, Seager).176

Still further contributions, influenced by narratological perspectives, tracenarrative patterns in Polybius’ work through close analysis of particularsections: the Mamertine crisis (Champion), the youth and last years of Philip

171 Guido Schepens and Jan Bollansée’s 2001 Leuven conference, leading to Shadow ofPolybius (2005); the 2008 conference in memory of Peter Derow, which sought to completehis unfinished project on ‘Rome and the Greeks’, Smith and Yarrow 2012; an important 2010conference on Polybius, organized in the Helmut-Schmidt-Universität in Hamburg by VolkerGrieb 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 ofcomposition and the content and purpose of his work and, on the other, his explanation of howand why Rome had been so successful, together with his own attitude towards Rome and herdomination since 168 b.c.’

173 Studies of Roman imperialism which have drawn on Polybius include volumes byChampion 2004a, Erskine 2010, and most recently Baronowski 2011, published too late forconsideration 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’saccount lie assumptions and aims directly related to his predecessors, to his contemporarysituation and (if he is a public figure like Polybius) to his own political career, his present stanceand 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.



V (McGing, Dreyer), the role of the Roman prokataskeuē in Books 1 and2 (Beck), or Polybius’ characterization of Boeotia in Book 20 (Müller). Twochapters look at Polybius through a wide Mediterranean context, exploitingthe 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 comingtogether of Mediterranean history (�ı��º�Œ�).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 thisintroductory chapter, two very different contributions bookend the volume:the first a detailed account of the genesis of the Polybian commentary, by JohnHenderson; the second an insight into the personal context in which thecommentary 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 literarycommentaries 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’ ‘creakingmetaphysics’ might be reassessed, in the light of new approaches to Greekreligious belief;179 or that there might be a renewed interest in issues of identityand the representation of cultural difference within the text.180 Given recentexplorations of the commentary as a genre, and given the extensive archive ofpapers that might support such a project, a fuller analysis (as called for by JohnHenderson below) of ‘the research methods, rhetorical strategies, or archivaleconomy embodied’ in Walbank’s commentary might also be likely.181

How our current interests are shaped by contemporary concerns beyondacademe we may only guess. However, with a recent experiment in politicalunion reeling, the gap between the ‘rich and the starving’ extending everfurther, and the ideal of a humane scholarship facing renewed threat, fiftyyears 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�ı��º�Œ�, the starting-point is of course Walbank 1975. Walbank reserved particular praisefor 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.



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