Polybius was brought into the world around 200 BC in the town of Megalopolis into a blue-blooded group of some notoriety. At that point, Megalopolis was important for the Achaean Confederation, a gathering of Greek city states which, alongside the Aetolian Association in north-focal Greece — had mixed to offset the could of a revived Macedonian government. Polybius' dad had filled in as the strategos — or top chosen official — of the Achaean confederation a few times all through the 180s BC, and in 170 BC Polybius was chosen, at the most youthful conceivable age, as hipparchos, or rangers commandant, the second-most elevated office in the confederation. While in office, he battled to save a pinch of Achaean independence, cautiously strolling a barely recognizable difference between ostensibly supporting Rome's conflict endeavors against Macedon, and an unsaid strategy of military nonpartisanship. This journey for an off-kilter balance remorselessly misfired when, toward the finish of the Third Macedonian Conflict, he was blamed for hostile to Roman lead (undoubtedly upbraided by one of his Greek political opponents) and inelegantly packaged, alongside around 1,000 different Achaeans, onto a boat destined for Italy. Maybe somewhat because of his raised economic wellbeing, he fostered a cozy relationship with the children of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the delegate whose armies had ground down the Macedonian phalanxes at the clash of Pydna in 168 BC. They ultimately mediated for his sake, empowering him to stay in Rome as opposed to figure out his reality in a grim country backwater like so many of his kindred Greek hostages. Polybius would come to lay out an especially close, semi fatherly, compatibility with the Paullus' subsequent child, Scipio Aemilianus. The last option would ultimately ascend to become quite possibly of Rome's most celebrated legislator, serving two times as diplomat and expressly regulating the last annihilation of Carthage. In the Narratives, Polybius lets us know that 'their colleague took its starting point in the credit of certain books and discussion about them,' — recommending he might have almost immediately satisfied something of the job of coach, prior to guaranteeing that he and the more youthful Roman came to 'respect each other with a warmth like that of father and child, or close to relations.'
Polybius' situation inside Scipionic circles gave him simple admittance to key political players, both Roman and unfamiliar, for his observer interviews — a cycle which, he over and over harps on in The Narratives, lay at the core of his strategic methodology. Furthermore, he seems to have been conceded far more prominent opportunity of development than most different exiles, and these peregrinations permitted him, thus, to participate in the top to bottom field work and geological studies he considered similarly essential to crafted by a decent student of history. For sure, proof would propose that as well as going with Scipio Aemilianus to Carthage, Polybius likewise gallivanted across Italy, doubtlessly 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 supposedly once jokingly told him directly, to an Odysseus anxiously pussyfooting his strategy for getting around a sleeping cyclops' sinkhole. Strung all through The Narratives, the insightful peruser can in this way distinguish a specific thoughtful despairing; a tranquil urgency over the sluggish suffocation of Greek freedoms; and a crawling moral negativity about Roman government's direction. The extremely half breed nature of Polybius' insight — as a detainee cum-insider of Rome — loans his Narratives their solitary quality, reminding one — in their borer looked at tender loving care — of other, later investigations of rising powers wrote by canny unfamiliar eyewitnesses — from Montesquieu's sharp disquisition on eighteenth-century Britain's constitution, to Alexis de Tocqueville's authoritative On Majority rules system in America.