Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century bce. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. This study, informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, demonstrates that Polybius'ss work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore-unappreciated subtlety and interest. It shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. The author focuses ... More

Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century bce. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. This study, informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, demonstrates that Polybius'ss work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore-unappreciated subtlety and interest. It shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. The author focuses primarily on the ideological presuppositions and predispositions of Polybius'ss different audiences in order to interpret the apparent contradictions and incongruities in his text. In this way he develops a “politics of cultural indeterminacy” in which Polybius's collective representations of political and ethnic groups have different meanings for different audiences in different contexts. Situating these representations in the ideological, political, and historical contexts from which they arose, the book affords insights into a work whose subtlety and complexity have gone largely unrecognized.