What are the qualifications for a good leader? Empathy, attention to detail and open-mindedness surely rank highly but if you asked the Greek politician Polybius (circa 200-118 BC) he would put “knowing your history” at the top of the list.
Polybius was a historian himself, and so not entirely objective, but there is undoubted strength to his argument. He firmly believed that historians should be useful in a practical way, while also emphasising the need for politicians to develop a truthful perspective on matters past and present, explains Brian McGing, emeritus professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin.
“Politicians often manipulate the past, rather than understand it,” McGing notes. “An example would be Boris Johnson’s unacceptably favourable interpretation of Britain’s glorious imperial past, used as a support for the argument that Britain should ‘stand on its own’.”
An inability to honestly engage with history remains a potent political issue today. Is Sinn Féin fit for government, critics of that party ask, if it cannot bring itself to see any wrong in what the IRA did?
Polybius himself was “out-and-out imperialist – indeed there was virtually no one in the ancient world who challenged the right of powerful nations to conquer weaker ones”, McGing points out. However, the Greek politician, who was also a soldier and is best-known for his work The Histories, didn’t romanticise war and would have looked upon the idea of progress with a jaundiced eye.
According to Polybius, a genuine historian – and by extension a proper politician – “may well be called on to praise his enemies and reproach his friends when the truth demands it” and thus should not be bound by in-group loyalty.
An inability to honestly engage with history remains a potent political issue today. Is Sinn Féin fit for government, critics of that party ask, if it cannot bring itself to see any wrong in what the IRA did?
“Trying to learn from ancient writers carries risks,” McGing says. “For all their cultural brilliance, part of what the Greeks and Romans left to us is slavery, racism and empire.”
Does this mean we should dismiss the teachings of Polybius and his Greco-Roma contemporaries? McGing believes not. Polybius may not be as celebrated as Aristotle or Cicero but “had an acute understanding of how nations and individuals gain, exercise and lose power, and how to write that history. His insights still provide food for thought.”
Judge for yourself. In the spirit of “What have the ancient Greeks ever done for us?”, McGing identifies for this week’s Unthinkable column – the first of the new season – five ideas which Polybius has bequeathed to the world:
1. Knowledge is important but historical knowledge is crucial
"The idea that history teaches vital lessons was there at the beginning of Greek history but Polybius constantly emphasises it and was insistent that you cannot be a politician without being a historian, and vice versa," says McGing. "It is not possible for politicians to make reliable decisions about the present and future without knowing, understanding and telling the truth about the past."
2. Truth really matters
"If history is not 'true', it is useless." So McGing summarises Polybius' standpoint. "Historians cannot be like lovers, Polybius says, seeing no fault in their own side: patriotism and friendship are human virtues, not historical ones."
3. We need "universal history" rather than analysis of isolated issues
"For Polybius, Rome had made the world – in his case, the Mediterranean basin – an interconnected whole, and the only way of studying it properly was to weave the separate strands of history into a single cloth. Some modern sociologists have suggested that Polybius should be seen as a foundational figure in the analysis of global processes and phenomena."
4. A "mixed" constitution is best
"Polybius didn't invent it, but his presentation of the balance in a constitution between monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements was the definitive version from the ancient world adopted by the founding fathers of the United States constitution – an odd one, it should be said, for a nation without monarch or aristocracy," says McGing.
“Some neo-Marxist scholars have also, unconvincingly in my opinion, taken up Polybius’s mixed constitution as a way of thinking about the structure of the modern world: the United States and its allies would be the monarchic element, the multinationals and nation states the aristocratic, and the UN and NGOs the democratic.
“A more realistic Irish adaptation of Polybius might pick up the idea of balance – between politics, the courts, big business/banking, multinationals, the church, the people. It was balance that was crucial for Polybius. It is by no means clear that we have achieved it.”
5. Don't expect things to turn out okay
Polybius saw history as a "cycle of constitutions". This was a process "by which states decline from the three basic and benign forms of government, kingship, aristocracy and democracy into their equivalent bad forms, in a naturally occurring cycle", McGing explains.
“Thus kings degenerate into tyrants, and are replaced by aristocracies; aristocracies turn into oligarchies, which are replaced by democracies; in the end populist leaders undermine democracy and introduce mob rule, and the state collapses into chaos, out of which a king emerges again and restarts the cycle.
“Polybius’s description was copied closely by Macchiavelli in his Discourses on the First 10 Books of Livy.
“Cyclical interpretations of history have largely gone out of fashion, although they turn up from time to time in American political thinking: for example, Arthur Schlesinger’s 1986 study, The Cycles of American History, and Jack Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time (2020), both of which recognise a debt to Polybius.
“I suspect that most people would think that we are, however imperfectly, progressing in a linear fashion, rather than going round in circles, but when you consider our apparent inability in Ireland to grasp problems in the health service, housing, climate change, social media, wealth distribution etc, the question does arise, are we really advancing?
“Is linear ‘progress’ looking increasingly elusive?”
Ask a Sage
Question: Feature films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Michael Collins continue to provoke strong emotions. Can a movie ever be considered historically accurate?
Polybius replies: "The goal of history and of tragedy is not the same, but the opposite. In the one it is necessary to bewilder and bewitch the listeners for the moment with the most plausible words, but in the other, one must teach and persuade – for all time and with true words and deeds – those who are eager to learn."
