Polybius' situation inside Scipionic circles furnished him with simple admittance to key political players, both Roman and unfamiliar, for his onlooker interviews — a cycle which, he more than once dwells on in The Chronicles, lay at the core of his strategic methodology. Likewise, he seems to have been conceded far more noteworthy opportunity of development than most different exiles, and these peregrinations permitted him, thus, to take part in the top to bottom field work and geographical overviews he considered similarly fundamental to crafted by a decent history specialist. For sure, proof would recommend that as well as going with Scipio Aemilianus to Carthage, Polybius likewise gallivanted across Italy, no doubt visited Spain and Gaul, and was even conceded consent to leave on a short excursion of revelation along Africa's western shores. But for this multitude of relative benefits and solaces, he would never stand to fail to remember that he at last stayed a political prisoner helpless before a savage extraordinary power's impulses — associated, Cato the Senior purportedly once jokingly told him directly, to an Odysseus apprehensively pussyfooting his strategy for getting around a sleeping cyclops' cave. Strung all through The Narratives, the keen peruser can in this manner distinguish a specific contemplative despairing; a peaceful distress over the sluggish suffocation of Greek freedoms; and a crawling moral cynicism about Roman dominion's direction. The exceptionally cross breed nature of Polybius' insight — as a detainee cum-insider of Rome — loans his Chronicles their particular quality, reminding one — in their drill looked at scrupulousness — of other, later investigations of rising powers wrote by shrewd unfamiliar spectators — from Montesquieu's sharp disquisition on eighteenth-century Britain's constitution, to Alexis de Tocqueville's authoritative On Vote based system in America.
It was throughout his seventeen years of bondage that Polybius set to the fantastic assignment of composing his set of experiences of Rome's transient ascent to unmistakable quality. As expressed in his presentation, he at first planned to cover the period from 220 BC — the start of the purported Social Conflicts (220 BC — 217 BC) in Greece — to 167 BC and Rome's triumph in the Third Macedonian Conflict, which to him denoted the last and conclusive coercion of the interwoven of fighting Greek statelets to Roman supremacy. In the same way as other a researcher entrapped in the thickening snare of his own examination plan, Polybius before long acknowledged he expected to change the extent of the task, coming to both further back and further forward. The last rendition of The Chronicles consequently begins in the years paving the way to the Primary Punic Conflict (264-241 BC), reaching a reasonably climactic end an entire 120 years after the fact, with the terrible obliteration of both Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC. Not exclusively was Polybius an immediate onlooker to the sack of Carthage, he likewise claims to have talked with maturing overcomers of the Subsequent Punic Conflict. As a place of examination, Livy, our other significant source on the Punic Conflicts, composed under the rule of Augustus, 150 years after the finish of the Third Punic Conflict. To some degree intriguingly, on account of Polybius' perfect work of art, we might be managing an uncommon instance of 'live history' : there's plausible, given his chronicles were serialized, that a portion of the lead Roman heroes of the Third Punic Conflict were at that point personally acquainted with his compositions on the prior clashes with Carthage.
The Chronicles were evidently a mammoth accomplishment — they contained forty volumes of which five books make due in full, another (maybe the most generally powerful, the popular Book VI) practically complete, alongside segments, some still very broad, of different volumes. Regardless of its relative discontinuity, the Accounts is extensively longer than anything either Herodotus or Thucydides have granted to us. What's more, to additionally underline Polybius' Gigantic efficiency, notwithstanding the Narratives, he made an eulogistic memoir out of his Achaean countryman and political legend, Philopoemen, an investigation of the Numantine battle in Spain, a work on military strategies, and perhaps a different monograph on geology. All, notwithstanding, tragically lost.