---
product_id: 69155687
title: "The Histories (Oxford World's Classics)"
brand: "polybiusrobin waterfield"
price: "A$34"
currency: AUD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 18
url: https://www.desertcart.com.au/products/69155687-the-histories-oxford-worlds-classics
store_origin: AU
region: Australia
---

# The Histories (Oxford World's Classics)

**Brand:** polybiusrobin waterfield
**Price:** A$34
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- **What is this?** The Histories (Oxford World's Classics) by polybiusrobin waterfield
- **How much does it cost?** A$34 with free shipping
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The Histories (Oxford World's Classics)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    War, War and More War
  

*by S***T on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 January 2016*

Polybius was one of the major Greek historians of the classical world and is also one of the least read.His work The Histories, of which only a fraction survives, purported to explain and elucidate Rome's ascendancy and supremacy over the known world towards the end of the second century BC.Ultimately, what survives of The Histories deals in the main with political history and especially warfare between city states.The high point for me was the account given of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage with Carthaginian general Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with his troops and elephants making for particularly gripping reading.Less captivating and harder to follow are the long drawn out accounts of internecine warfare in the Greek world before it came under Roman control.I found myself reading without ingesting, so to speak, when it came to this part of the narrative.Aside from tactical warfare, Polybius makes many outspoken remarks, an unusual tendency in those days, on how history should be written, and the proper task of the historian which should be essential reading to modern students of historiography; for instance, armchair historians who rely solely on book learning and who lack direct experience of politics and warfare come in for a serious beating in Book Twelve.Finally, there is most famously the incomplete but nonetheless influential account of Rome's so-called 'mixed constitution' in Book Six which I studied in my Roman history class years ago, and which came to inform writers like Machiavelli and Monstesquieu in their theorising about the State.Reading the book cover to cover, I got a sense of how all pervasive and constant warfare was in the classical world, particularly the Mediterranean area, and also how bloody tough and unforgiving life must have been back then, even though Polybius sadly does not cover the day to day life of the many as opposed to the mighty; and why should he have done, since that was a given at the time he was writing.The greatest value of the book may precisely lie in undoing romantic notions of the Greco-Roman world in its constant conflict and battles for supremacy which, surprisingly, become rather tedious to read about after so many pages but have the merit to put the ills of the modern world—also ridden with conflict—in perspective.As regards the translation, I have not read the Greek nor any other English translation of this work, but suffice it to say that the rendering in English was tolerably clear and even at times quite enjoyable to read, which comes as little surprise the translator, Robin Waterfield, being a writer rather than an academic by trade, at least according to the biographical description of him in the book itself.The introduction is certainly competent and helps make sense and organise the whole text as it now stands.My score for the book is four stars because, while the highs are very high, there is plenty in Polybius that is of little interest to the modern reader, except as a reminder that the struggle for power was as pronounced back then as it is now.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    An excellent new translation
  

*by R***L on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2016*

This comes across as a very nice new translation, which tackles what can be a difficult text to work with, given that Polybius wrote in the "koine" or the common dialect of Greek in the 2nd Century BC. Most Greek texts were written in, or in imitation of, 5th Century BC Attic.In addition, Polybius is also a technical writer for his time and speaks with precision. This where translators need a detailed contextual background and it is here that Robin Waterfield, like so many, comes a little unstuck. An example is the term "longchophoroi", which Loeb translates as "pikemen" and Waterfield renders as "spearmen". Neither is correct but the error is understandable as the word "longche" does mean "spear" but cannot mean "pike" as there is a specific word in the period for "pike" - "sarissa". Likewise, "phalangitai" is the word for "pikemen" and the original word is used in the context of skirmishing infantry - try skirmishing with a 21ft spear!The word "longche" is used in the context of a spear which is thrown, so is here being used to tell is that these "spearmen" are in fact skirmishers, so would be better rendered as "light foot", which would work well alongside "euzonoi" (the lightest foot) and distinguish them by their relative willingness to drive off their opposite numbers. Likewise the word "kathoplisma" (if I have spelt that correctly) has a whole story behind it but I'll leave that for another day.This is an excellent and readable translation. It is understandable that the fragmented books were left out as some are mere paragraphs and this absence is more than compensated for by Robin Waterfield's superb notes and textual explainations.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Truncated, meta-historical, yet Polybius.
  

*by S***H on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 October 2019*

This edition contains books 1-5 complete, along with everything that survives of books 6 and 12. This means that there's a lot missing, but you get all the Punic war stuff down to Cannae, along with accounts of contemporaneous events in Greece, Egypt and Asia. You get no account of events after circa 216 BC, so nothing about the Punic wars after Cannae, nor about the Roman conquests of Greece, Macedon or Asia. It is not a bad selection, since book 6 (on meta-politics and the Roman constitution) is essential, and book 12 contains a lot of fascinating tidbits, e.g. on Spartan polyandry. The selection seems to have been made with students of ancient historiology in mind, since it includes many passages of historiological critique. I guess that might appeal to someone, somewhere. Personally, I wish they'd given us a complete popular edition of Polybius, even if that meant 2 volumes, but this is not a horrible compromise. The rival penguin edition goes for a selection from many of the books, which necessitates excerpting all of them heavily, whereas this edition gives the completest of the surviving books, without any excerptions. In the end it can't fail because it's still Polybius. If you like ancient history, it's bound to enthrall you.

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*Last updated: 2026-03-16*