OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/2/2013, SPi 1 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 Liverpool in July 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Frank Walbank’s Historical Commentary on Polybius. It might instead have commemorated other milestones: the completion (if not the publication1) seventy-five years before of Walbank’s Aratos of Sicyon; or— still further back—his introduction to Polybius, when as an 18-year-old schoolboy in 1927 he was asked by his teacher, Ned Goddard, to translate and précis ‘a small, rather grubby German school edition’ (in the phrase used in Walbank’s own unpublished memoir, the Hypomnemata).2 Above and beyond any such dates, of course, the conference was intended not to honour any particular volume but rather the man behind them. Frank Walbank was unable to attend the conference in person, but he discussed with us our plans for the conference, he opened the proceedings with a video message (printed before this introduction), and he was able to read a number of the papers. He died on 23 October 2008. Together with the contributors to this volume, and many more, we remain hugely grateful for his support, for his example, and for his scholarly legacy. There can be no modern scholar more closely associated with an ancient author than Walbank with Polybius. As Polybius made his life’s work the telling of the story of ‘by what means and under what form of constitution the 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 publications unless 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 a subsequent memoir, ‘Summary of years 1946–1977’: SCA D1037/2/3/21/57. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/2/2013, SPi 2 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison inhabited world to their sole government’ (Plb. 1. 1. 5), Polybius and his world were Walbank's life and work.3 In addition to the 2,357 pages of distilled scholarship which make up the three-volume Commentary, the monographs on Aratus and on Philip V which were the stepping-stones to it, and his revisions to Paton’s Loeb edition (now emerging, but which for a long time seemed to have ‘run into the sand’4), his numerous articles which range over Hellenistic history and Greek historiography, even if they do not feature the name of Polybius in their titles,5 are frequently rooted in interpretations of his text. ‘Perhaps the day will come’, wrote one approving reviewer of Philip V,6 ‘when Mr Walbank, as he matures, will attempt a general view, and give to the general public (what his learning qualifies him to give) a picture of that Hellenized eastern Mediterranean into which Rome moved, and with which Rome fused, during the second and first centuries B.C.’ That too he duly accomplished, through his Fontana History, The Hellenistic World, and (for more scholarly readers) through his contributions to the histories of Macedo- nia and the Hellenistic volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History which he co-edited.7 Whatever disagreements might be had over details, and no matter that some of his earlier publications—written, it should be remembered, around three-quarters of a century ago—reflect the concerns and agendas of their time,8 it is clear that, if any scholar’s output can be said to represent more than the sum of its parts, Walbank’s can. His achievement, in the words of one recent assessment (that of John Davies), was to ‘[bring] Polybios out of the specialist side-channels into the mainstream of historiography ...to make his theme and period ...into one of the central stories of Classical Antiquity, and ...to set the gold standard for a historical commentary on a Classical text’.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 Great Trinity 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 and mistakes, but should praise and admire them, considering the times they lived in, for having ascertained 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 SCA D1037/2/3/9/46, a letter to Oswyn Murray dated 24 Aug. 1988. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/2/2013, SPi F. W. Walbank, Polybius, and the Decline of Greece 3 later writings are peppered with modest acknowledgements of how his views had been altered by subsequent work, or of his appreciation of the greater complexity of a given topic11—for, as he says of Polybius, ‘no man can remain entirely the same for fifty years’12—, there is also an extraordinary consistency in his work, both in terms of the themes addressed and the manner of their treatment, a consistency which conveys the sense almost of a sustained programme. 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 that it took Rome less time, according to Polybius, to achieve world hegemony— fifty-three years—than FWW has had to polish off the Histories’13, and the same point was made by Walbank himself in the context of Book 6.14 It was also the result of an extraordinary doggedness, an eye for detail, and ‘ship-shape organi- zation’—traits reflected also in his dealings with publishers, and the organization of his papers15—as well as the difficult personal circumstances from which Polybius provided a refuge.16 It also required imagination—the imagination, first, even to conceive of a scholarly enterprise, such as the commentary, on so grand a scale and with such a consistent format. (Although the first volume of A. W. Gomme’s commentary on Thucydides was published in 1945, only a year after Walbank had agreed to undertake Polybius, his ostensible model in early discussions was How and Wells’ Herodotus.17) The leap of imagination required was all the more extraordinary given the wartime context. As Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press wrote to him in announcing that the delegates ‘have agreed to encourage’ the commentary, ‘It is good to think that in these times 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 him was not a restful experience. When he sat at his desk that outpouring of energy became mental focus 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 number of volumes of commentary required: ‘This work is planned to be in three volumes’ (Gomme 1945: v). 18 See below, p. 53. Subsequently Walbank himself expressed regret that the pressure imposed for immediate publications ‘makes scholars less inclined to take on work likely to occupy several years’ (2002: 2). OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/2/2013, SPi 4 Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison Imagination was also required to set Polybius and his Histories so painstak- ingly within their setting. An understanding of the physical context of ancient history, first, was fundamental both to Walbank’s own evolution as a historian and to his historical approach. The cruise on which Walbank first visited Greece 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 in the Greek world.19 ‘[S]tudents [of ancient history]’, he wrote later, ‘should all (ideally) have made their own periegesis of some Mediterranean land.’20 His earliest work, Aratos of Sicyon, is replete with references to the geography of modern Greece, the result of a Leaf Travelling Studentship awarded by his Cambridge college in 1932.21 (‘From the top [of Pentelicon]’, he wrote in his report on his travels, ‘there is as much to be learnt about Greek history as from weeks of Bury.’22) In his reviews of others’ work, sketch-maps and illustrations of topography are always welcomed, though ‘carelessness in matters of topog- raphy may seem more venial’.23 As he enjoined his students, ‘Unless one knows Greece as is, constantly making false pictures.