Edward Gibbon wrote, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” His great predecessor the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200 – c.118 BC) seems on close analysis by the reader to have believed that history was little more than the register of different people doing the same things over and over again.
His purpose in writing the Histories was to explain how Rome in only 53 years went from being a local power to mastery of the Mediterranean world and its environs. In Book VI of his Histories, he examined the various constitutions under which states operate arguing that Rome’s at the time was the best of those he knew and was a large reason for its rise to domination.
Polybius describes six forms of governments, all transitory and which merge with the next in regular cyclical succession. Despotism is the first form of government. The emergence of a strongman who seizes control of the group in which he exists. Kingship evolves from despotism as a consequence of honorable and effective leadership. Polybius asserts that morality transmutes despotism into kingship.
The good behavior of a king does not guarantee that his heirs may be likewise effective and honorable. Thus Polybius asserts that inevitably kingship degenerates into tyranny. This state in turn eventually causes good men to band together to overthrow the tyrant. The people in gratitude for the release from tyranny grant authority to those who have relieved them. Thus tyranny is followed by aristocracy.
But the same problem arises with the succesion of new generations. Polybius in a powerful passage describes how aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy which is as unstable as was tyranny.
But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers,—having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position,—some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. Aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before, and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.
The citizens desperate to rid themselves of rule by the privileged and corrupt few turn to democracy. Polybius describes this change in the constitution of society thusly: Having then got rid of these rulers by assassination or exile, they do not venture to set up a king again, being still in terror of the injustice to which this led before; nor dare they entrust the common interests again to more than one, considering the recent example of their misconduct: and therefore, as the only sound hope left them is that which depends upon themselves, they are driven to take refuge in that; and so changed the constitution from an oligarchy to a democracy.
The historian then posits that democracy degenerates into a rule of corruption and violence, only to be stopped by a return to despotism. He outlines the path from democracy to mob rule to despotism as follows: But as soon as a new generation has arisen, and the democracy has descended to their children’s children, long association weakens their value for equality and freedom, and some seek to become more powerful than the ordinary citizens; and the most liable to this temptation are the rich. Democracy degenerates into rule of corruption and violence, only to be stopped by a return to despotism. So when they begin to be fond of office, and find themselves unable to obtain it by their own unassisted efforts and their own merits, they ruin their estates, while enticing and corrupting the common people in every possible way. By which means when, in their senseless mania for reputation, they have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot.
Polybius sees each form of government as inherently unstable, planted at its inception with the seeds of its own destruction. He was writing over 2,000 years ago. The rise and fall of civilizations and cultures may not be exactly as he depicted them, but his central point is prescient and undiminished. Yeats echoed this view when he wrote, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Everything human is temporary. As a later political observer commented, Anything that can end will end.
It was Polybius himself who described Scipio Aemelianus weeping at the final destruction of Carthage as he realized eventually the same fate would descend on his own country. Polybius, his mentor and friend, was with Scipio at the razing of Carthage.
Polybius’ views on government seem as if written yesterday rather than two millennia ago. The link will take you to Book VI of his Histories. In fact, all the extant books of his monumental work can be found there. Polybius Histories Book VI
