The Histories
A Greek statesman’s history of Rome’s rise to rule the Mediterranean, written in the second century BC. Polybius was a contemporary of Antiochus IV, and his fragments on that king give an outside account of the ruler the books of Maccabees describe.
Polybius of Megalopolis was a leading man of the Achaean League. After Rome defeated Macedon in 168 BC he was taken to Italy as a hostage and lived there for many years, close to the family of Scipio. His forty books covered the years 220 to 146 BC. Only the first five survive whole. The rest, including everything on Antiochus IV, is known from excerpts made by later writers and Byzantine compilers.
What survives on Antiochus is therefore a set of fragments: the king’s eccentric behaviour at Antioch, for which Polybius says he was nicknamed Epimanes, “the madman”, in place of Epiphanes (26.1); the Roman envoy who forced him out of Egypt in 168 BC (29.27); and his death in Persia after an attempt to rob a temple (31.9). Polybius was alive when these things happened. Josephus quotes a lost passage in which he mentions the Jews and their temple (Antiquities 12.135–136).
Cited in
- 167 BC, estimated date