Polybius
- sulla80
- 14 hours ago
- 8 min read
Anacyclosis (The Cycle of Governance)
"Such is the cycle of political revolution, the course appointed by nature in which constitutions change, disappear, and finally return to the point from which they started."
-Polybius, Histories, 6.9.10 Polybius called this theory "anacyclosis" - the recurring cycle of political revolution. He developed it to answer a specific question: at Cannae, why didn't Rome collapse like every other state would have? During the Second Punic War, Rome suffered a terrible defeat by Hannibal and Carthage at Cannae (216 BC). The Roman state should have collapsed and instead, Rome absorbed the worst military disaster in ancient history and kept functioning. Polybius identified Rome's mixed constitution as the reason for Rome's success.
Polybius was born in Megalopolis a member of the Achaean league where he lived until he was ~33 years old. Rome defeated Perseus, the last king of Macedon, in 168. In the next year, Polybius was one of 1,000 Achaean political detainees forcibly deported because the League hadn't been enthusiastic enough in supporting Rome vs. Macedon. He spent 16 years in Rome where he began writing his Histories, which would become forty books covering 264-146 BC. He was taken into the household of Aemilius Paullus and became the mentor and companion of his son Scipio Aemilianus (after Carthage he would become known as Scipio Africanus the Younger).
The Conquerors
Scipio Aemilianus was the biological son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the general who defeated Perseus at Pydna in 168 BC, the campaign that resulted in Polybius being shipped to Rome as a hostage. Scipio Aemilianus was then adopted by Publius Cornelius Scipio, the son of Scipio Africanus — the legendary general who defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC. Through this adoption he became, legally, the grandson of the man who won the Second Punic War.
The young man that Polybius mentored was a descendant of the conqueror of Macedon and the adopted grandson of the man who defeated Hannibal. And Scipio Aemilianus added to the the family portfolio of Roman victories by personally destroying Carthage in 146 BC - the same year Rome destroyed Corinth and dissolved the Achaean League. Polybius was reportedly standing beside him as Carthage burned, and later wrote that Scipio wept and quoted Homer, foreseeing that Rome itself would one day meet the same fate.
The Manuscript
Polybius attributed the success of Rome to its mixed constitution, that took the best of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and combined them in one. His writings had far reaching influence in Europe as manuscripts preserved by the Byzantine Empire arrived in Florence in the 15th century before and after the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453. The oldest surviving manuscript of the complete first five books is "Vaticanus Graecus 124", dating to approximately 947 AD. Machiavelli read Polybius and used the anacyclosis in his Discourses on Livy.
The US Constitution
John Adams considered Polybius one of the most important teachers of constitutional theory. In his "Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787), Adams cited Polybius extensively and dedicated an entire chapter to his theories, adopting the anacyclosis as his core argument for why unchecked power in any single body - whether one man, a few, or the many - inevitably corrupts and collapses. Adams used Polybius to justify the principle of separation of powers in a modern republic: an independent executive, a bicameral legislature dividing aristocratic and democratic elements, and an independent judiciary. Adams believed that the American constitution could improve on the model of Rome thanks to Polybius' analysis.-
The Achaean League also offered the American republic a model of federated democracy. Madison and Hamilton discussed the Achaean League at length in Federalist No. 18, drawing on Polybius' account. The Americans were struggling under the Articles of Confederation with the balance between local autonomy and federal unity: the League's answer was to centralize foreign policy, military command, and coinage while leaving internal governance to each member city. The Achaean League and the older Amphictyonic Council were two models debated.
The Coin
This silver triobol, 2.43 grams, 15 millimeters across, is the Achaean League's federal project made physical. The obverse carries a laureate head of Zeus, patron deity of Arcadia. The reverse carries the League's monogram, stamped identically on coins minted across dozens of autonomous cities, from Argos to Corinth to Megalopolis. Only the tiny letters in the field, K-Δ/M, identify this coin as Megalopolitan, the hometown of Polybius. The standardized weight, the shared type, the common monogram: this is what a federal currency looks like before anyone had a word for federalism.
Madison would spend the summer of 1787 arguing this principle: sovereign states yielding just enough autonomy to speak with one voice. He got his model from Polybius. Polybius got it from the world that minted this coin.
Although the auction house dates this coin to 175–168 BC, before Pydna, Thompson's 1968 analysis of the Agrinion Hoard places it in the Late Period of League coinage, approximately 160-150 BC - after the deportation, after the Roman settlement, while Polybius was already in Rome writing the Histories. Later scholarship supports this later dating, broadening the range to 160-146 BC: the final years of the League's existence. Megalopolis was still minting federal coinage while its most famous son was in Rome, theorizing about why federal systems work.
The Attribution
Ancient coins can be traced to specific issues by matching the dies that struck them - as each die was hand engraved all coins struck by a given pair of dies produces identical details as a fingerprint. Die links across coins enable sequencing of the coins in time. This is the tedious work of die studies.
My coin was incorrectly identified by the auction house (it is not BCD Peloponnesos 1543.1. Clerk 204) and incorrectly classified by Clerk in his 1895 catalog: it is actually BCD 1551.1 - which I was able to recognize when I found a double die match to my coin in ACSearch.
The coin illustrated in Clerk (295) is also a double die match to my coin.
Clerk also got the mint wrong - he assigned in 1895 assignment by to Messina. This was definitively overturned by Thompson in 1968, who with evidence from the Agrinion Hoard concluded that this coin was a later coin of Megalopolis.
"A fourth issue, with M or image over a fulmen (our 471) is given to Megalopolis by Weil, Löbbecke and Crosby-Grace; to Messene by Clerk. On Plates XXXVIII-XXXIX (471–474) the fulmen issue and the second syrinx striking of Megalopolis are shown in juxtaposition. The four obverse dies are unmistakably from the same hand and the two issues are further connected by the ΞB or BΞ control combination which appears on the reverse of the fulmen coins and on the obverse of those with syrinx. Clerk's separation of the two issues is not supported by the numismatic evidence."
The most recent scholarship aligns this coin with Thompson's dating and is a little broader : 160–146 BC after Pydna and before the the end of the Achaean League.
The Cycle Returns
"In the case of those Greek states which have often risen to greatness and have often experienced a complete change of fortune, it is an easy matter both to describe their past and to pronounce as to their future. For there is no difficulty in reporting the known facts, and it is not hard to foretell the future"
-Polybius, Histories 6.2 On the Forms of StatesPolybius opened his constitutional theory with a warning: every simple form of government carries within it the seed of its own corruption. Monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, and from the chaos a new strongman emerges to begin the cycle again. He believed Rome had escaped this fate through its mixed constitution - and he was wrong.
The republic he admired destroyed itself within a century of his death. Adams and Madison read Polybius and believed they could succeed where Rome had failed, that the American constitution, built on the lessons of every previous collapse, could finally arrest the cycle. I find myself questioning whether Polybius' cycle is once again being proven true.
References
Adams, John. A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Vol. 1. London: C. Dilly, 1787.
Benner, Steve M. Achaian League Coinage of the 3rd through 1st Centuries B.C.E. Classical Studies 7. Lancaster, PA: Classical Numismatic Group, 2008.
Clerk, A.G. The Coins of the Achaean League. London: Royal Numismatic Society, 1895.
Crosby, M., and E. Grace. An Achaean League Hoard. Numismatic Notes and Monographs 74. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1936. [The Arcadia Hoard]
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. New York: New American Library, 1961.
Löbbecke, A. "Ein Fund achäischer Bundesmünzen." Zeitschrift für Numismatik 26 (1908): 275–303. [The Caserta Hoard]
Madison, James. "Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies, [April–June?] 1786." In The Papers of James Madison, vol. 9, 9 April 1786 – 24 May 1787 and supplement 1781–1784, edited by Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal, 3–22. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975.
McGing, Brian C. Polybius' Histories. Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Polybius. The Histories. Translated by W.R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954
Thompson, Margaret. The Agrinion Hoard. Numismatic Notes and Monographs 159. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1968.
The Triumph of Aemilius Paulus, Carle (Antoine Charles Horace) Vernet, French, 1789, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 632
"Coins of Peloponnesos: The BCD Collection" cataloged by Alan S. Walker and sold as LHS Numismatics Auction 96, Zürich, 8-9 May 2006
Weil, R. "Das Münzwesen des Achäischen Bundes." Zeitschrift für Numismatik 9 (1882): 199–272.
"We should therefore assert that there are six kinds of governments, the three above (kingship, aristocracy, and democracy) mentioned which are in everyone’s mouth and the three which are naturally allied to them, I mean monarchy, oligarchy, and mob-rule. Now the first of these to come into being is monarchy, its growth being natural and unaided ; and next arises kingship derived from monarchy by the aid of art and by the correction of defects. Monarchy first changes into its vicious allied form, tyranny; and next, the abolishment of both gives birth to aristocracy. Aristocracy by its very nature degenerates into oligarchy; and when the commons inflamed by anger take vengeance on this government for its unjust rule, democracy comes into being ; and in due course the license and lawlessness of this form of government produces mob-rule to complete the series. The truth of what I have just said will be quite clear to anyone who pays due attention to such beginnings, origins, and changes as are in each case natural."
-Polybius 6.4
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