previous next

Preface

PERHAPS a resumé of events in each Olympiad may arrest the attention of my readers both by their number and importance, the transactions in every part of the world being brought under one view.
144th Olympiad, B. C. 204-200.
However, I think the events of this Olympiad especially will do so; because in it the wars in Italy and Libya came to an end; and I cannot imagine any one not caring to inquire what sort of catastrophe and conclusion they had. For everybody, though extremely interested in details and particulars, naturally longs to be told the end of a story. I may add that it was in this period also that the kings gave the clearest indication of their character and policy. For what was only rumour in regard to them before was now become a matter of clear and universal knowledge, even to those who did not care to take part in public business. Therefore, as I wished to make my narrative worthy of its subject, I have not, as in former instances, included the history of two years in one book. . . .

Elected Consul for B.C. 205 (see 11, 33) Scipio had Sicily assigned as his provincia, with leave to cross to Africa if necessary (Livy, 28, 45). He sent Laelius to Africa in B.C. 205, but remained himself in Sicily. Next spring (B.C. 204) he crossed to Africa with a year's additional imperium. In the course of this year he ravaged the Carthaginian territory and besieged Utica (Livy, 29, 35), and at the beginning of B.C. 203 his imperium was prolonged till he should have finished the war (id. 30, 1).

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

Robert B. Strassler provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Theodorus Büttner-Wobst after L. Dindorf, 1893)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
205 BC (2)
204 BC (1)
203 BC (1)
hide References (3 total)
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (3):
    • Livy, The History of Rome, Book 28, 45
    • Livy, The History of Rome, Book 29, 35
    • Livy, The History of Rome, Book 30, 1
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: