Polybius ( c. 203 – 120 BC ) wrote on the rise of Rome to world prominence, and attempted to harmonize the Greek and Roman points of view.

Other noteworthy and famous Greek historians include Plutarch ( 2nd century AD ), who wrote several biographies, the Parallel Lives, in which he wanted to assess the morality of its characters by comparing them in pairs, and Polybius ( 3nd century BC ), who developed Thucydides's method further, becoming one of the most objective historians of classical antiquity.

According to the Bauer-Danker Lexicon, the noun ίδιωτής in ancient Greek meant " civilian " ( ref Josephus Bell 2 178 ), " private citizen " ( ref sb 3924 9 25 ), " private soldier as opposed to officer ," ( Polybius 1. 69 ), " relatively unskilled, not clever ," ( Herodotus 2, 81 and 7 199 ).

According to Pausanias and the Greek historian Polybius, an inscribed pillar ( stele ) was erected near the altar of Zeus on Mt.

Polybius and Plutarch, a Greek author writing under the Roman empire, cite a battle at Mt.

Polybius (; 200 – 118 BC ), Greek ) was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic Period noted for his work, The Histories, which covered the period of 220 – 146 BC in detail.

Polybius was charged with the difficult task of organizing the new form of government in the Greek cities, and in this office he gained great recognition.

In addition, Polybius wrote an extensive treatise entitled Tactics, which may have detailed Roman and Greek military tactics.

Peter Green suggests it would be well to remember Polybius was chronicling Rome's history for a Greek audience with the aim of convincing them of the necessity of accepting Roman rule – which he believed was inevitable.

Perhaps the earliest of these, Polybius ( 2nd century BC ), uses Pados ( in Greek ) and says that it was to be identified with the Eridanos of the poets.

However, Greek-influenced Roman authors, such as Polybius and Cicero, sometimes also used the term as a translation for the Greek politeia which could mean regime generally, but could also be applied to certain specific types of regime which did not exactly correspond to that of the Roman Republic.

The Greek historian Polybius, writing more than a century before Livy, became one of the first to describe the emergence of the Roman Empire.

Polybius, a Greek historian, came up with a more complex system of alphabetical smoke signals around 150 BC.

Subsequent Greek historians — such as Ctesias, Diodorus, Strabo, Polybius and Plutarch — held up Thucydides ' writings as a model of truthful history.

* 203 BC – Polybius, Greek historian, famous for his book called " The Histories " or " The Rise of the Roman Empire ", covering in detail the period between 220 and 146 BC ( d. 120 BC )

Polybius gives as an image of society within an Illyrian kingdom as peasant infantry fought under aristocrats which he calls in Greek Polydynastae ( Greek: Πολυδυνάστες ) where each one controlled a town within the kingdom.

* Polybius, Greek historian ( b. c. 203 BC )

* With the aid of the Greek statesman and historian Polybius, the son of the former Seleucid king Seleucus IV Philopator, Demetrius escapes from Rome, where he has been held as a hostage for many years, and returns to Syria to claim the throne from his nephew Antiochus V. In the resulting dispute, Antiochus V and his regent, Lysias, are overthrown and put to death.

Polybius ' history renders the Roman god Mars by Greek Ares but the Roman god Quirinus by Enyalius, and the same identifications are made by later writers such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, perhaps only because it made sense that a Roman god who was sometimes confounded with Mars and sometimes differentiated should be represented in Greek by a name that was similarly sometimes equated with Ares ( who definitely corresponded with Mars ) and was sometimes differentiated.

The Greek historian Polybius believed that when no cause can be discovered to events such as floods, drought or frosts then the cause of these events may be fairly attributed to Tyche.

In ancient Greece it was known as " κρίθινος οἶνος " ( krithinos oinos ), " barley wine " and it is mentioned amongst others by Greek historians Xenophon in his work Anabasis and Polybius in his work The Histories, where he mentions that Phaeacians kept barleywine in silver and golden kraters.

According to the historian Polybius, considerable debate took place in Rome on the question of whether to accept the Mamertines ' appeal for help, and thus likely enter into a war with Carthage.

Polybius is also credited for being the first historian to write a History of the World, and to offer argued explanations and interpretations of history facts, and not only a record of them.

Polybius held that historians should only chronicle events whose participants the historian was able to interview, and was among the first to champion the notion of having factual integrity in historical writing, while avoiding bias.

The substance of Polybius ’ work is based on historical information and conveys his role as a historian.

In Polybius ' time, the profession of a historian required political experience ( which aided in differentiating between fact and fiction ) and familiarity with the geography surrounding one's subject matter to supply an accurate version of events.

His beliefs as to the character of a good statesman led Polybius to reject historian Theopompus ' description of Philip's private, drunken debauchery.

Much of what is known of this century comes from the works of the Roman historian Polybius, whose main concern is the story of how Rome comes to dominate the known world.

The Romans take hundreds of prisoners from the leading families of Macedonia, including the historian Polybius.

He procured the release of Polybius, the historian, and his fellow prisoners, contemptuously asking whether the Senate had nothing more important to do than discuss whether a few Greeks should die at Rome or in their own land.

Polybius, a historian of the 2nd century BC, admits that much of the overall success in the Gallic War belongs to Marcellus ’ colleague, Scipio, but because Marcellus had won the spolia opima, Marcellus was celebrated triumphantly.

According to the Greek historian Polybius, our principal source on the Constitution of the Roman Republic, the Roman Senate was the predominant branch of government.

The Greek historian Polybius, in his Histories, gives a graphic account of mining and counter mining at the Roman siege of Ambracia:

* Polybius, Greek historian

This is viewed by military historians as one of the greatest battlefield maneuvers in history, and is cited as the first successful use of the pincer movement to have been recorded in detail by the Greek historian Polybius.

The ancient historian Timaeus gave Timoleon high accolades in his work ; however, Polybius criticized Timaeus for bias in favor of Timoleon and many modern historians have sided with Polybius.

During the height of the Roman Empire, famous historians such as Polybius, Livy and Plutarch documented the rise of the Roman Republic, and the organization and histories of other nations, while statesmen like Julius Caesar, Cicero and others provided us with examples of the politics of the republic and Rome's empire and wars.

The famous Greek historian Polybius wrote that Rome used a wrecked Carthaginian quinquereme captured at Messina as a model for the entire fleet, and that the Romans would have otherwise had no basis for design.

He had noticed, says Polybius, a “ place between the two camps, flat indeed and treeless, but well adapted for an ambuscade, as it was traversed by a water-course with steep banks, densely overgrown with brambles and other thorny plants, and here he proposed to lay a stratagem to surprise the enemy ”.

There was a fourth bureau for miscellaneous issues, which was put under Polybius until his execution for treason.

Polybius states that the Carthaginians had 130 ships, but does not give an exact figure for the Romans.

If Polybius is correct in his figure for the number of troops he commanded after the crossing of the Rhone, this would suggest that he had lost almost half of his force.

Polybius claims Hannibal's men marched for four days and three nights, “ through a land that was under water ”, suffering terribly from fatigue and enforced want of sleep.

As Polybius recounts, " he calculated that, if he passed the camp and made a descent into the district beyond, Flaminius ( partly for fear of popular reproach and partly of personal irritation ) would be unable to endure watching passively the devastation of the country but would spontaneously follow him.

As Polybius notes, " How much more serious was the defeat of Cannae, than those that preceded it can be seen by the behavior of Rome ’ s allies ; before that fateful day, their loyalty remained unshaken, now it began to waver for the simple reason that they despaired of Roman Power.

Polybius describes the system for the distribution of watchwords in the Roman military as follows:

Polybius is also renowned for his ideas concerning the separation of powers in government, later used in Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws and in the drafting of the United States Constitution.

Lycortas attracted the suspicion of the Romans, and Polybius subsequently was one of the 1, 000 Achaean nobles who were transported to Rome as hostages in 167 BC, and was detained there for 17 years.

While Polybius was not the first to promote this ideal ; it was his account that provided the most vivid, cogent illustration of this ideal for later political theorists.

The British author Adrian Goldsworthy also constantly mentions Polybius ' connections with Scipio when calling upon Polybius as a source for the latter's time as a general.

Polybius was responsible for a useful tool in telegraphy that allowed letters to be easily signaled using a numerical system ( mentioned in Hist.

* At Polybius ' request, Scipio Aemilianus manages to gain the support of the Roman statesman Cato the Elder ( whose son has married Scipio's sister Aemilia ) for a proposal to release ( and return to Greece ) the 300 Achaean internees who are still being held without trial after being deported to Rome in 167 BC.

), and for later writers, Polybius, Josephus, the Chronicon Paschale, George Syncellus, George Hamartolus, and so on.