Polybius

father of Alexander the Great. Polybius portrays him as the ideal statesman

Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?

The Persians for a certain length of time were possessed of a great empire and dominion.

Lacedaemonians, after contending for supremacy in Greece for many generations, w

The Macedonians obtained dominion in Europe from the lands bordering on the Adriatic to the Danube,

My History begins in the 140th Olympiad

My work thus begins where that of Aratus of Sicyon leaves off.

Now up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions, as widely separated in their origin and results as in their localities. But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity

This is why I have fixed upon this era as the starting-point of my work. For it was their victory over the Carthaginians in this war, and their conviction that thereby the most difficult and most essential step towards universal empire had been taken, which encouraged the Romans for the first time to stretch out their hands upon the rest, and to cross with an army into Greece and Asia.

so it is my task as an historian to put before my readers a compendious view of the part played by Fortune in bringing about the general catastrophe.