May I begin with a personal reminiscence? Fifty years ago, when I was just finishing my second year as a student at Cambridge, my teacher, B. L. Hallward, the author of the chapters on the Punic Wars in The Cambridge Ancient History, came to me and said: ‘You have exactly two weeks free of work before the end of term. That will be enough to learn Italian. Then, next year, you can read De Sanctis.’ As I soon discovered, he was too optimistic: two weeks is not enough to learn Italian! But I did learn sufficient to enable me (with the help of a dictionary) to read Volume III of the Storia dei Romani. It was a wonderful experience, which I have never forgotten. Through it I came to have a better understanding of Polybius, who has been a constant friend and companion ever since – as indeed he was clearly a constant companion (if not a friend) of De Sanctis himself.

As we know from his Ricordi, he first encountered Polybius as a schoolboy. After reading Thucydides, he tells us, ‘I found a translation of Polybius, and here too my attention was arrested and I was led to make efforts beyond my childish understanding to comprehend and assess the reasoned exposition of the causes of the Second Punic War; and after that I was unbelievably impressed by the lucid and dramatic account of Hannibal's invasion.’

Within the New Testament no one knew better than Luke how to recount the work of the Spirit. He has given the Spirit such central importance that Eugène Jacquier in 1926 writes: ‘The Acts are, so to speak, the Gospel of the Spirit.’ This designation, as we shall see in what follows, is only partially justified.

In saying that the work of the pneuma is unfolded here in such a central way does not necessarily mean that the rest of the New Testament is silent with regard to the Spirit. Along with the author of Luke–Acts, Paul and John are the two other New Testament theologians who develop a pneumatology. Briefly, Pauline thought situates the Spirit, on the one hand, as the foundation of faith (‘No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit’, 1 Cor. 12. 3), and, on the other hand, as the norm for Christian existence, through ‘the law of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8). The evangelist John develops his pneumatology in the framework of the farewell speeches: the Paraclete actualizes Jesus’ teaching (14. 25–6); he reveals the Son (15. 26–7), and leads to the fullness of the truth (16. 13–15); he has a word function. In the Acts of the Apostles, we never encounter the idea that the Holy Spirit provokes faith, or that he glorifies the Son. On the other hand, Luke continually shows the Spirit taking hold of communities, directing the apostles, inciting actions, speaking, ordering, forbidding, and so on.

As my thanks-offering for the fifteen years hard labour he has put into producing LCM for our common good John Pinsent will expect something Polybian: for he is well aware that old dogs do not easily learn new tricks. I am therefore submitting to his highly critical eye some observations on Polybius' attitude towards the past. By that I do not mean that part of the past which makes up his basic theme – how in just under fifty-three years, from 220 to 168 bc, the Romans made themselves rulers of the whole known world – but rather his attitude towards the whole of the past, Greek and Roman, what in that past he regarded as important and how it linked up with the topic which he chose for his own Histories. For how a historian sees the past generally does not merely help to determine how he will approach his own particular topic. It is also relevant to the breadth of his historical understanding and humanity. In Goethe's words:

For Polybius, it is true, three thousand years is more than we have any right to demand. For Greeks and Romans alike the significant past was much briefer than that. But in principle Goethe's words are true for Polybius, as they are for us all.

The historian's relationship to the past is a strange one.

INTRODUCTION

As the historian of Rome's rise to world power Polybius was not particularly interested in the concept of decline. His main concern was to analyse why Rome had got to where she was. But one essential element in his analysis was to assess the merits of the Roman constitution and compare it with other constitutions; and consequently, as a political theorist, Polybius was brought up against decline as a problem. His views on this are interesting for the light they throw on the quality of his political thought and also for the traditions on which he draws. In order to set his views in a proper context, I shall first give a brief sketch of the attested stages in the composition of the Histories.

Polybius conceived and began his Histories while detained at Rome. After the Third Macedonian War, which ended in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy in 168, many Greeks, Polybius among them, were summoned to Rome and refused permission to return to their homes until 150. While at Rome Polybius lived on close terms with Scipio Aemilianus, a member of a leading noble family, and having come to appreciate Roman political greatness and to understand its sources (or so he believed) he resolved to write a history, primarily for his fellow-Greeks, which would explain ‘how and thanks to what sort of constitution the Romans in less than fifty-three years had succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sway’.

The question of the relationship between Jews and Christians has become a point of tension in the exegesis of Luke's work. The unusual vehemence with which this debate is conducted stems from its background: the reassessment of the Jewish–Christian relationship after the Shoah. In this context, biblical scholars rushed in to review the image of Judaism conveyed by the New Testament texts: in which cases is anti-Judaism a fact internal to the Scriptures and in which cases is it a perverse effect of the reading of the Scriptures? But the focusing on Luke–Acts can be explained by a fact peculiar to Luke's work itself: of all the New Testament writings, Luke–Acts presents not the most negative image of Judaism but the most difficult to grasp.

A contaminated debate

The fifty-two chapters of history from Luke 1 to Acts 28 lead the reader from the Temple in Jerusalem, at the beginning of the gospel, to Rome, where the book of Acts ends. What kind of relationship does Christianity have with Judaism? Is the movement from Jerusalem to Rome a symbolic shift? Has the God of Luke turned his back on Judaism in order to adopt Rome and pagan Christianity? Or does Christianity construct itself, on the contrary, in close continuity with the tradition of the fathers?

It is true that the reader could be surprised by the anachronism of the question.

One of the characteristics of the end of the twentieth century was the extraordinary development of the travel industry: modes of transport, communication channels and the tourist market. Travelling is no longer the impossible dream. This revolution in mobility is not without parallels in history. Of course, there was the fifteenth century with its great maritime conquests (the Indies, America). Earlier, the crusades had stimulated curiosity in the Orient. Another period, less known, but just as influential in the launching of travel was the turn of the Christian era in the Roman Empire. There are numerous indications which lead us to believe that the Mediterranean populations of this period were fascinated by travel.

An effect of globalization

Historians agree in describing the Roman Empire as a world in which, everywhere, interest in unknownworlds, the development of the means of communication, and the stability assured by the Pax Augustana come together to intensify exchange.

In 1985 the Cambridge University Press published a score of my separata in a volume entitled Selected Papers. The present volume contains a further nineteen papers, mostly dealing with Polybius. The majority of these were originally published after 1985, but I have included a few earlier ones, for which there was no room in the earlier volume. I have prefaced them with a newly written chapter, in which I have attempted a survey of the main topics and directions apparent in Polybian studies over the last twenty-five years and have indicated how the papers appearing here fit in with those trends. These papers are arranged in four sections. First, there are nine historical and geographical papers; next, five concerned with Polybius as a historian; then, three on Polybius and Rome; and finally two dealing with the later significance of Polybius, the first in seventeenth-century England at the time of Dryden and the second in twentieth-century Italy, as seen in the writings of the historian Gaetano De Sanctis.

In one or two places, and especially in papers which involve Polybius' views on the Roman constitution, there is some slight repetition; this is unfortunate, but was inevitable if the argument was to be clearly presented in each paper. After full consideration, it seemed better to reprint the articles as they were written and not to abbreviate them in a way likely to cause confusion in any reference to them.

‘Leaders and masses’ has been chosen as a suitable theme around which to organise a celebration of the author of Plebs and Princeps. Zvi Yavetz's work deals primarily with the age of Caesar and the early empire. But what happened then was largely the outcome of developments in Roman public life in the second century, during which Rome achieved predominance in the Mediterranean world. Our guide to that earlier period is Polybius' Histories and as my contribution to this volume I propose to examine Polybius' perception of leaders and masses, the one and the many, and the rôle he saw each fulfilling in the Greece where he was brought up and then in the Rome with which he became familiar as an exile and as a historian. It will, I think, emerge that he saw these two opposites as basic elements in the political process which he was concerned to analyse.

‘The many’ is a phrase which at once conjures up the notion of ‘democracy’. But the meaning of the word ‘democracy’, δημοκρατία, in Hellenistic Greece has been the subject of controversy over the last fifty years. In an important article published in 1945, J. A. O. Larsen argued that in the Hellenistic period the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ were used loosely as the virtual equivalent of ‘self-governing’ and that any contrast implied in their use was not, as formerly, with ‘oligarchic’, but rather with the idea of domination by an outside ruler.

Luke, not Eusebius of Caesarea, was the first Christian historian. In antiquity, he was the first to present a religious movement in a historiographical manner. As for all historians, the aim of Luke is identity. When he recounts the birth of Christianity, its undesirable rupture with Judaism, and then the universal adventure of the Word, the author of Acts offers the Christianity of his time, an understanding of its identity through a return to its origins.

My reading of the historiographical work of Luke combines two procedures of investigation: historical criticism and narrative criticism. I am convinced that the understanding of a biblical writing requires that it be immersed in the historical milieu of its production (this is the epistemological credo of the historical-critical method). Constantly, in the course of the study, I shall be examining the culture and codes of communication of the ancient Mediterranean world to which Luke and his readers belong. However, the author of Acts is also a storyteller; the tools of narrative criticism help to identify the strategy of the narrator, the organization of the story, and the programmatic clues for reading that he has sown in his text.

One of the insights defended in this book is that we cannot reach the theology the author has written into his work without adopting the itinerary he imposes on his readers; this itinerary is the twists and turns of the narrative.

What image of God does the author of Luke–Acts offer his readers? In the small number of studies devoted to this question, the majority offer an analysis of the contents, enumerating the characteristics with which Luke adorns the God of his narrative: God as the agent of salvation history, Jesus as the mirror of the Father's action, the joy of God at the return of the lost, the God Peter discovers to be universal (Acts 10–11), the providential God of the sermon in Athens, and so forth. Thus, there emerges the portrait of a God faithful to what he has promised, a God who moves toward a universal programme, and who is openly interventionist in his guidance of history.

However, this type of study, which consists in extracting from the Lucan text what it says about God, must be questioned in regard to its method. Marcel Dumais, in a recent account of the state of the research on the Acts of the Apostles, notes that an exhaustive portrait of the God of Luke remains to be painted, as research up to this point has focused on pneumatology, Christology, and the conception of history. In my opinion, such an enterprise cannot bypass the manner in which Luke, in his narrative, constructs a discourse about God. For if one presses the text of Luke in search of his statements about God, one accumulates in effect a jumble of parables, visions, logia and trances, human discourse and angelic revelations.

There are two main obstacles when one tries to analyse the aims of Greek historians of the fourth to the second centuries bc: one is the failure of most of them to survive other than in fragments, the other is the fact that among those fragments it is only the rare passage that touches on purpose and method. The outstanding exception on both counts is of course Polybius: but, as I hope to show, he is not entirely representative. One of the themes that arise repeatedly in his work is the contrast between history for instruction and history for pleasure. In the brief space here available I want to take a look at this theme and ask what it can reveal about the general aims and practices of Polybius and his predecessors and contemporaries.

At the outset we should note that the antithesis use/pleasure is not one peculiar to history-writing. Many years ago Pohlenz demonstrated the existence of a theory of art, probably going back to the sophist Gorgias, which saw enjoyment, Ψυχαγωγία, as a means of improving the reader, the listener or the onlooker, both morally and intellectually. All arts shared this function, but especially poetry and tragedy. The general acceptance of this theory had been partially obscured by the fact that two of the most outstanding critics – Plato and Aristotle – either attacked the claim or ignored it. For Plato the content of poetry was untrue and could not therefore provide useful lessons.