Introduction
For over a century (between the outbreak of hostilities in 265 BCE and the destruction of the city of Carthage in 146 BCE) the two most powerful states of the Mediterranean engaged each other in a series of conflicts. The First and Second of these Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage were fought on a scale scarcely rivalled until the modern era. Hundreds of thousands of North African and European sailors and soldiers were employed in theatres spanning the Mediterranean Basin, including the Balkans, Greece, Sicily, North Africa, Spain, France, the Alps, and the Italian peninsula. The expense of maintaining these large armies and navies consumed the economic resources of both states, and the human costs were even higher. A substantial percentage of the adult male population of Italy was annihilated, with Rome losing 50,000 dead in one battle alone (Cannae in 216). Nor were military personnel the only casualties. In a further parallel with modern warfare, huge numbers of civilians were also killed, either massacred following the siege of a city, killed in raids on towns, villages, and farms by the armies of both sides, or meeting death as a result of starvation brought on by the confiscation of crops and animals to provision the troops.Footnote 1
By the end of the conflict Carthage was in ruins and its culture extinguished. This was despite the extraordinary efforts of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who, during the Second Punic War, undertook one of the rare examples known to history of an invasion of Europe by a North African power. Had Rome not been able to withstand this assault, her imperial future and even survival would have been in doubt, and the course of world history dramatically altered. Rome not only survived but evolved from being a regional Italian power into a position of unrivalled dominance in the Mediterranean world, and by 146 BCE was well on its way to creating a substantial empire that would control much of western Eurasia and North Africa for the next few centuries. The struggle with Carthage enabled the Romans to conceive of themselves for the first time as a trans-regional power, and accustomed them to sending armies over large distances to fight in widely separated theatres simultaneously. It goes without saying that the imperial structure that eventually ensued late in the first century BCE had a profound effect on the subsequent history of Europe, West Asia, and North Africa, and (through eventual European global colonization) on that of much of the rest of the world as well.
The effect of this epic conflict on the philosophy and methodology of history writing in western Eurasia was equally profound. That the historians of the Mediterranean Basin should have felt compelled to write accounts of the largest conflict in their world is hardly surprising. But the fact that the wars were fought on such an epic scale meant that the historians had to adopt a similarly wide-ranging approach in their accounts, seeking out connections across time and space in a manner that demanded a broader, more inclusive conception of historical accounting. The ultimate historiographical result of the Punic Wars was the confirmation of a universal conception of history as the pre-eminent method for the description of historical processes on this sort of scale, as can be seen in the accounts of the wars by Polybius (c.200–c.118 BCE) and Diodorus Siculus (fl. first century BCE).
This was not just a Western historiographical development, however. A similar relationship between state expansion and historiographical response can be discerned at the eastern end of the Eurasian continent during the rule of the powerful Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE–220 CE). The Early and Later Han presided over a four-century-long period of political consolidation under strong central government with a well-organized and highly educated bureaucracy. This was also the first great age of Chinese imperial expansion. Under the Han, the Chinese state grew very large indeed, eventually stretching from modern Vietnam in the south to the Korean Peninsula in the north, and from the coast of the China Sea deep into the heart of Central Asia. This dramatic expansion of the Chinese polity had major world historical implications, because it was during the Early Han that an East Asian state began to engage with the rest of Eurasia for the first time. Eventually, by the first century of the Common Era, much of Afro-Eurasia was connected together through a network of trade routes that facilitated extraordinary levels of material and cultural exchange, although the key players at either end of the network – the Romans and the Han – were largely ignorant of each other's culture and political structures.
This expansion came despite the best efforts of the powerful Xiongnu militarized nomadic confederation, which controlled vast steppe regions to the north and west of the Han state. The Xiongnu had erected a military and intelligence barrier between Han China and the ‘Western Regions’, a barrier that was only effectively breached for the first time by the Chinese late in the second century BCE, as will be discussed below. This barrier was as much a product of Han foreign policy during the early decades of the dynasty as it was of Xiongnu military prowess. During those decades, all emperors pursued a policy characterized by appeasement and the implementation of a succession of isolationist ‘peace’ treaties. These treaties negotiated by the Han with the Xiongnu leadership were always on terms more favourable to the latter, in that, as well as facilitating mercantile opportunities, the Han also agreed to pay tribute to the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu needed to do little more than periodically raid Chinese territory as a reminder to the Han of their capabilities, in order to encourage the Chinese court to continue paying tribute and thus maintain the peace.
This Han policy remained in place until six years into the reign of Wudi, the ‘Martial Emperor’, which commenced in 141 BCE. Wudi initially maintained the existing policy of non-aggression towards the Xiongnu, and there was no outbreak of open conflict between them until he attempted to ambush Xiongnu troops near the city of Mayi in 134 BCE.Footnote 2 Subsequent events suggest, however, that even from the beginning of his reign Wudi may have been pursuing an aggressive, expansionist agenda. An important component of Wudi's strategy was an attempt to form an offensive alliance with the Yuezhi confederation, which had been driven out of the region by the Xiongnu several decades earlier. It was these attempts by Wudi to destroy the power of the Xiongnu, both through direct military action, and also by dispatching envoys deep into Central Asia to form strategic alliances against them, that precipitated the first great age of Chinese imperial expansion. By the end of his reign in 87 BCE, the Han had succeeded in constructing a formidable empire.Footnote 3 The Han historian Sima Qian (c.145–90 BCEFootnote 4) was acutely aware of these shifts in Han foreign policy because he lived through and catalogued this critical period in Early Han history.
Like Polybius and Diodorus Siculus, Sima Qian developed a universal history. All three wove detailed descriptions of these processes into complex narratives that synthesized events into an organic whole, which resulted in a universal conception of history that added up to something more than a mere recounting of events. This article analyses the historiographical implications of these epic conflicts between Carthage and Rome, and between the Han Chinese and the Xiongnu, both because of the fascinating nature of the relationship between the particular events and their recounting, and because an understanding of this relationship allows us to trace the evolution of universal history in two critically important regions of ancient Eurasia. In the same way that the Mediterranean-wide campaigns of the Punic Wars, and the conflict between China and her militarized steppe nomadic neighbours that spanned much of eastern Eurasia, helped to determine the subsequent direction of world history, the accounts of those events written during the last two centuries before the Common Era went on to affect profoundly the methodology and philosophy of subsequent world historiography.
Universal history
Attempts to define ‘universal history’ have been made by historians for at least two millennia. Common to these definitions is the notion that this is a form of history that treats the affairs of the known world as though they were those of a single organic whole, and which argues that this unified whole adds up to something much more useful than its constituent parts. Distinguishing universal history from world history is not easy, but one distinction might be that, where world history attempts to provide an inclusive and broad-ranging survey of events, universal history emphasizes the continuity and connections between those events by organizing them around a particular theme, or a handful of thematic frameworks, as a means of contextualizing and making sense of the events themselves, and of connecting these various ‘parts’ together into a more organic and unified narrative. This was certainly the understanding of universal history promoted by the three historians considered here, and also by late classical Christian historians including Eusebius and Orosius, who believed that all history was ultimately universal in that the affairs of humans were best understood through the unfolding of a single theme, the relationship between God and his people.Footnote 5 This was similar to the understanding of universal history articulated by Islamic historians such as Muhammad al-Tabari in the early tenth century, and Ibn Khaldun and Rashid al-Din Hamadani in the fourteenth.Footnote 6 More recently, Marshall Hodgson argued explicitly in favour of a universal approach:
The attempt to study large-scale history is plagued with many problems, but we can set aside some at least that have been said to plague a universal history. We need not be deterred, of course, by the sheer quantity of events in so wide an area. We are not concerned, after all, with each of the events that have happened in each nation, but only those which have involved major segments of mankind, and so set a framework for all our historical experience.Footnote 7
The origins of universal history are not clearly defined, but the link between inter-regional conflict and state expansion in ancient Eurasia, on the one hand, and an increasingly trans-cultural, trans-regional conception of history writing, on the other, is undeniable. An early example of this is the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, whose interest in the states contiguous to the eastern Mediterranean intensified after the attempted Persian invasions forced the Greeks to consider their relationship to a large, expansive imperial structure: ‘What Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth: in order that the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that the great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.’Footnote 8
Raoul Mortley articulated a similar link between the evolution of a Greek universal conception of history and inter-civilizational conflict in the Hellenistic era, following the campaigns of Alexander:
The universal history was a genre for its time. It provided a view of history that was capable of giving an account of the entire new world opened up by the conquests of Alexander, of incorporating the experiences of the barbaroi as something less than exotic, and of providing the reader with a sense of unity within diversity. It came out of the new Greek internationalism engendered by Alexander.Footnote 9
As will be discussed in more detail below, Sima Qian, very much in the manner of Herodotus, also developed an intense historical and anthropological interest in the world around him. Siep Stuurman, in a comparative study of Herodotus and Sima Qian, points out three specific similarities between the approaches of Herodotus and Sima Qian: they both included serious ethnographical studies in their accounts, both formulated critical perspectives on empire, and both engaged in a ‘serious and open-minded investigation of “barbarian culture”’.Footnote 10 And, like his Greco-Roman counterparts, Sima Qian was also intent upon making sense of the confusing details of historical events by fitting them into an organized, universal structure.
Polybius, Diodorus, and the emergence of universal history in Greco-Roman historiography
This notion of employing a single theme as the organizational structure to unfold a universal narrative was employed by Polybius in the second century BCE, who explored the unification of the hitherto disparate histories of the Mediterranean through the lens of the expansion of Roman hegemony.Footnote 11 In constructing his universal account Polybius recognized the Punic Wars as an event of world historiographical significance, arguing that ‘from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and of Africa were connected with those of Asia and Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end’.Footnote 12 A century later Diodorus Siculus, even more aware (with the benefit of hindsight) of how the success of Rome following the Punic Wars had united the histories of all the states of the Mediterranean into a unified whole, also noted the historiographical implications of this when he wrote that ‘historians, in recording the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state, have made of the treatises a single reckoning of past events’.Footnote 13
Polybius remains the most important historian of the Punic Wars. As an Achaean nobleman he fought against the Romans in the Third Macedonian War, before he was taken as a hostage to Rome in 167 BCE. Through fortuitous circumstances he became an intimate of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who later led the Roman army that destroyed Carthage. From this position of privilege he was able to travel extensively throughout the western Mediterranean, speak to veterans of the Hannibalic War and visit many of the major sites, and accompany Scipio on campaigns to Spain and Africa where he was an eyewitness to crucial events in the Third Punic War. Polybius completed forty books on the conflicts, but only a small part of the total work has survived. Although he was close to one of the great patrician families, and an unashamed admirer of Rome, this did not prevent him from criticizing Roman incompetence or duplicity, and his account is generally considered to be accurate.Footnote 14
Polybius makes explicit early on that his Histories will be a work of universal history structured around a single theme – the expansion and development of the Roman state:
There can surely be nobody so petty or so apathetic in his outlook that he has no desire to discover by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than 53 years [i.e. from 220 BCE (the start of the Second Punic War) to 167 BCE] in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement that is without parallel in human history.Footnote 15
Polybius compares the ‘superior greatness’ of Rome to three empires that had preceded it – those of the Persians, the Lacadaemonians, and the Macedonians – finding limitations in each of their methods and ambitions. Roman imperialism, on the other hand, ‘was not partial; nearly the whole inhabited world was reduced by them to obedience’.Footnote 16 As a result of this conquest, the various regions of the Mediterranean ceased to have separate histories, but rather became interconnected: ‘But from this time forth history becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity.’Footnote 17 It is in this context that Polybius clearly recognizes both the political and psychological significance of the Punic Wars in setting the Roman state on a path towards eventual imperial expansion, a process Brian McGing describes as ‘the transformation of Rome from an Italian peninsular state into the first and only pan-Mediterranean super power’.Footnote 18 Polybius is convinced of the significance of the Punic Wars in this process: ‘For it was their victory over the Carthaginians in this war, and their conviction that thereby the most difficult and most essential step towards universal empire had been taken, which encouraged the Romans for the first time to stretch out their hands upon the rest, and cross with an army into Greece and Asia.’Footnote 19
Having outlined his theme, Polybius argues that its exploration will demand a very particular approach to the writing of history, in which the nature of the events must be matched by the style of their accounting: ‘Just as Fortune made almost all the affairs of the world converge upon one and the same point; so it is my task as an historian to put before my readers a compendious view’.Footnote 20 Before embarking upon his task, however, he offers a stinging critique of the methodologies adopted by other historians. He finds factual inconsistencies with accounts of Alexander's campaign;Footnote 21 questions other historians for their ‘want of skill and judgement’, which completely destroyed the value of their eyewitness evidence;Footnote 22 and is highly suspicious of the apparent impartiality of yet others because they composed their histories ‘as part of the business of politicians’.Footnote 23
Frank Walbank argues that one of Polybius’ principal reasons in deciding to write history at all was ‘to assert his own view of what history should be against the sort of history which was widely written and read in the Hellenistic age’.Footnote 24 In particular, Polybius is critical of the limited and narrow process of inductive reasoning, the idea that one can obtain ‘a competent view of universal from episodical history’.Footnote 25 While some idea of the whole might be obtained from the part, ‘clear comprehension’ can not: ‘And of this we cannot obtain a comprehensive view from writers of mere episodes. It would be as absurd to expect to do so as for a man to imagine he has learnt the shape of the whole world, its entire arrangement and order, because he has visited one after the other the most famous cities in it.’Footnote 26 Polybius offered an alternative method, which Walbank simply describes as ‘history on a large canvas’.Footnote 27 As Polybius put it: ‘It is only by the combination and comparison of the separate parts of the whole – by observing their likeness and their difference – that a man can attain his object; can obtain a view at once clear and complete.’Footnote 28
Once Polybius’ aim of writing the history of the unification of the oikoumene (‘the whole [civilized] world’Footnote 29) under Roman hegemony becomes clear, one must ask to what extent he was tempted to manipulate his recounting of events to further project the idea of the unity of the historical composition. He was able to circumvent this temptation to a certain extent by arguing that it was tyche (‘fortune’) that was the agent responsible for the historical unification, whereas his role as historian was simply to represent this in the form of a unified work of history.Footnote 30 Walbank, in a discussion of the ambiguous meaning of tyche to Polybius, suggests that there is an ambiguity in the role that Polybius assigns to fortune/chance/tyche in Roman expansion: ‘Was Rome's success the result of her own determination in achieving a conscious aim, or was it planned and imposed by a supernatural power?’Footnote 31 Polybius also gives new meaning to universal history by explicitly identifying it with the history of his own time, and no other. For him, the unification of the oikoumene by tyche was a unique event in history that demanded a correspondingly original approach to its recording. This, Polybius claims, is what distinguishes his universalism from that of his Hellenistic predecessors.
As noted above, Mortley traces the emergence of a universal perspective in history to the expanded Greek worldview of the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic era. Its intention was to ‘incorporate the experiences of the barbaroi as something less than exotic’, and at the same time to provide the reader with a ‘sense of unity within diversity’ as Greek culture found itself penetrating a host of local cultures that dotted the oikoumene.Footnote 32 In this sense, a modified version of universal history would also be a perfectly appropriate method to account for the growth of what became the Roman empire, which similarly attempted to achieve a level of cultural unity within an array of diverse colonial cultures. The perceived appropriateness and increasing popularity of this approach led to a great flourishing of universal history in the Greco-Roman world, although only about 5% of the total has survived.
This suggests that, although Polybius might have been the first historian in a position to describe the unification of the known world into a political and cultural whole, his approach was clearly influenced by his Classical and Hellenistic predecessors and their literary, historical, and philosophical concerns. Plato, for example, had argued that the whole is more than the sum of its parts;Footnote 33 and Aristotle had suggested that the whole has a cause that actually creates its unity or wholeness, and that eventually the wholeness of something becomes its purpose.Footnote 34 But Aristotle went on to claim that poetry was better able to express this sense of the universal than history: ‘poetry is a more scientific and serious thing than history. For poetry gives universal truths while history gives particular facts.’Footnote 35 The universal historian disputes this dictum, arguing that history is equally capable of universal truths, not just particular and segmented facts. Despite Aristotle's argument, universal history clearly did become an important part of Greek and Hellenistic literature, although more in the form of a monograph that focused on a limited and localized theme, in the manner of Thucydides’ study of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote 36 It was Polybius who first advanced the idea that thematically organized history on a much larger scale could also achieve a sense of organic unity, which could then be superimposed onto the course of particular events.Footnote 37 In Walbank's assessment: ‘In doing this he not only justified his method, he also produced a highly sophisticated version of the historians’ traditional boast that his theme was inherently greater and more important than that of any of his predecessors.’Footnote 38
Polybius then applied this organic concept of history to the detailed accounting of the course of the Punic Wars by using what could almost be described as a cinematographic technique. In a recent article, François Hartog also describes Polybius’ approach as ‘synoptic’, arguing that in offering this broad view the historian might have been influenced by contemporary dramatic theory, which becomes the basis for articulating the interdependency of historical events. Hartog suggests that this approach might indicate a strong engagement with Aristotle, despite the latter's critique of history in the Poetics, as noted above.Footnote 39
Choosing as his starting date the 140th Olympiad (221–216 BCE), Polybius introduces his theme by providing a broad but very connected overview of events occurring across the Mediterranean Basin: ‘In Greece the so-called Social War, the first which was waged by Philip of Macedon …; in Asia the war for the possession of Coele-Syria, fought between Antiochus and Ptolemy Philopator; and in Italy, Africa and the neighbouring countries the war between Rome and Carthage.’Footnote 40 Thereafter he uses a wide range of historical lenses, moving in for detailed ‘close-up’ examinations of specific events and personalities where required, before panning back out for a wide-angled attempt to place those detailed vignettes into their appropriate context. In the survey-like Book 2, for example, the reader is carried from ‘Affairs in Spain’ to an account of ‘The Romans in Illyria’, back to Spain before a digression on the relationship between Romans and Gauls, then to Spain again before a final consideration of ‘Events in Greece’, particularly those concerning the Achaean League. In other places Polybius offers detailed analysis of ‘The Roman constitution in its prime’, the ‘Treaty between Hannibal and Philip of Macedon’ and the ‘Siege of Tarentum’. He is also interested in the psychology of the protagonists of the Punic Wars, offering studies of the characters of Hannibal, Philip, and Scipio. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, in an analysis of the historiographical implications of ‘big history’,Footnote 41 has suggested that the professionalization of history writing in the nineteenth century had the effect of severely reducing the range of lenses that had previously been available to historians, naturalizing the ‘viewing of individual actions lens’ as the default mode of historical perspective.Footnote 42 Polybius, intent upon offering a compendious, synoptic, thematically organized description of the events that unfolded in the Punic Wars, was clearly a historian willing to use the widest range of lenses to create a work of universal history.
The other major historian who turned his attention to the Punic Wars was the Sicilian Greek Diodorus Siculus, who produced his Library of history near the end of the first century BCE.Footnote 43 Originally consisting of forty books, only fragments have survived, although these are sufficient to demonstrate that Diodorus clearly had available to him numerous lost sources, including a pro-Carthaginian account by Philinus of Agrigentum, a third-century BCE historian who accompanied Hannibal during his campaigns. Mortley suggests that, where Polybius’ view of the wholeness of the world was a practical and empirical one, based as it was on the political reality of Roman expansion, Diodorus had a more abstract conception of the unity of the oikoumene based on a sense of the universality of human nature.Footnote 44 Like Polybius, however, Diodorus was also only too aware of the realities of the expanding Roman state. In the decade between 70 and 60 BCE he would have observed the entire Mediterranean shoreline brought under Roman control by Pompey, with Roman supremacy extended, as Diodorus himself puts it, ‘to the bounds of the inhabited world’.Footnote 45 Yet Mortley believes that Diodorus was seeking more than a mere recounting of practical realities, but rather the articulation of ‘some doctrine of a universal human nature with a single underlying quality’.Footnote 46
Diodorus does address this question of a ‘common human nature’ early on by considering the origins of the human race. Following an extraordinary account of the creation of the universe and the shaping of the planet (shades of big history here) he settles upon Egypt as the cultural source of all subsequent human history: ‘And since Egypt is the country where mythology places the origin of the gods, where the earliest observations of the stars are said to have been made, and where, furthermore, many noteworthy deeds of great men are recorded, we shall begin our history with the events connected with Egypt.’Footnote 47 In a way that would be controversial today (in light of disagreements between Afrocentric and Hellenocentric understandings of the origins of Greek civilizationFootnote 48) Diodorus accounts for the spread of these original Egyptian conceptions by crediting the god Osiris with influencing Greek and all subsequent human culture, through his ‘priestly scribe’ Hermes: ‘It was by Hermes … that the common language of mankind was first further articulated, and that many objects which were still nameless received an appellation, that the alphabet was invented, and that ordinances regarding the honours and offerings due to the gods were duly established.’Footnote 49
This does tend to support Mortley's argument that Diodorus’ conception of history is based on some notion of the universality of human nature, a very different understanding from that which drove Polybius to account for the realities of the spread of Roman hegemony and the enforced application of a common political structure. Yet the end result was very much the same, for Diodorus also produced a work of universal history in which the whole was greater than its parts, and where truth was more likely to be revealed by moving from the general to the particular. Whether inspired by philosophy or politics, Diodorus like Polybius is intent upon ‘recording the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state’.Footnote 50 Furthermore, he argues that the product of his labours, his universal history, will have practical as well as metaphysical value:
For it endows the young with the wisdom of the aged, while for the old it multiplies the experience which they already possess; citizens in private station it qualifies for leadership; and the leaders it incites, through the immortality of the glory it confers, to undertake the noblest deeds; soldiers again it makes more ready to face dangers in defence of their country because of the encomiums they will receive after death, and wicked men it turns aside from their impulse towards evil through the everlasting opprobrium to which it will condemn them.Footnote 51
The contents of Diodorus’ forty volumes illustrate not only these dual intentions but also a Polybius-like ability to bring a range of perspectives to his task. Hence explanations of the myths and origins of the gods and peoples of Egypt, Assyria, India, Arabia, the Amazons and Atlantis are followed by accounts of the military and political history of Greece and Rome. Then, from Book 11 on, the broad anthropological and theological focus of the first ten volumes is replaced by detailed descriptions of specific events, related in a tight chronological framework. Book 13, for example, covers the years 415–405 BCE, Book 17 the years 335–324, and Book 20 the years 310–302.
In the context of the Punic Wars, it is Diodorus’ Books 41–50 (301–60 BCE) that are most relevant. Although these have survived in fragmentary form only, they provide crucial information that helps fill out our understanding of events during the First Punic War in particular; they also demonstrate that a universalist conception of history need not preclude the incorporation of a considerable amount of closely focused and specific detail. His comments upon the maritime and land campaigns undertaken by the Romans in Sicily in the mid third century BCE, for example, move seamlessly from statistical minutiae to a broad analysis of consequences. Explicitly citing the lost Carthaginian source, Philinus, Diodorus carefully lists the forces available to the Carthaginians under Hanno – 60 elephants, 6,000 cavalry, and 50,000 infantry.Footnote 52 In a subsequent battle with the Roman forces north of Agrigentum, he tells us that Hanno quickly lost 3,000 infantry and 200 cavalry killed, 4,000 men captured, and 43 of the elephants either killed or disabled. The Romans also lost significant numbers but out of a much larger force totalling 100,000, so that proportionally these losses were not as devastating.Footnote 53 Then, drawing back to place all this in context, he demonstrates that the ultimate consequence of the engagement was that some 67 Sicilian cities defected to the Roman side, forcing the Carthaginians to sue for peace.Footnote 54 In this manner, like any good historian, Diodorus is able to fit the detailed pieces of the historical jigsaw into the much larger picture of the ebb and flow of the war, ensuring that the events themselves always remain subordinate to, and serve well, his universal theme.
Sima Qian and the emergence of universal history in Chinese historiography
At the opposite end of Eurasia, and writing just a few decades before Diodorus, the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian was also focused on making sense of the confusing details of historical events by fitting them into an organized, universal structure. Just five years after the Roman destruction of the city of Carthage, the Martial Emperor Wudi came to the throne of Han China, in 141 BCE. He assumed control of an imperial state that had experienced millennia of relative geographic and cultural isolation from events beyond the borders of China. The only serious interruption had come from across the north-western frontier in the form of regular raids by the semi-nomadic Xiongnu. This confrontation between sedentary China and the steppe nomads of the north was the defining theme of Chinese and indeed Inner Eurasian geo-politics during the centuries that straddled the Common Era divide. The historiographical impact proved just as significant, and the blueprint for our understanding of this relationship from a Chinese perspective was laid down by Sima Qian in a monograph that he composed on the history and culture of the Xiongnu, one of the 130 chapters of his major historical treatise, the Shiji. In working out the manner whereby the ‘other’ could be incorporated into what was essentially a history of China, Sima Qian was forced to radically extend the scope of his analysis. What emerged was the first work of universal history written from an east Eurasian perspective.Footnote 55
On a political level, as had been the case with the Greeks in western Eurasia some centuries earlier, confrontations between sedentary state structures and barbaroi who were seen as existing ‘beyond the pale’ (that is east of the Bosphorus in the case of the Persians, or north-west of the great bend in the Yellow River in the case of the Xiongnu) were responsible for an extension of military theatres and diplomatic missions. But these interactions also forced historians to expand their horizons, not only to incorporate and try to understand the barbaroi but even to question (or at least define more critically) the very foundational beliefs and characteristics of their own civilizations.Footnote 56 This meant that historians such as Sima Qian in the East, and, as we have seen, Polybius and Diodorus (and much earlier HerodotusFootnote 57) in the West, were no longer able to consider their own cultures as isolated worlds unto themselves, but as entities embedded in much larger frameworks of cultural interaction. In that context, Sima Qian's attempt to incorporate the steppe nomads (and a range of other non-Chinese peoples) demanded a serious modification of traditional Chinese historiography.
Sima Qian's attempt to find a role for various ‘outsiders’ in his history, particularly that of Han China's principal enemies, the Xiongnu, was not without risk. This was a highly sensitive subject for the historian and he laid himself open to the charge of ‘barbarophilia’ by his contemporaries. This meant that his attempt to offer an accurate and relatively impartial ethnographic description had to compete with fears not only of censorship of the Shiji but also of serious personal consequences. We get some sense of the constraint under which he was operating in a colophon that he attached to the end of his ‘Account of the Xiongnu’:
When Confucius wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals he was very open in treating the reigns of Yin and Huan, the early dukes of Lu; but when he came to the later periods of the Dukes Ding and Ai, his writing was much more covert. Because in the latter case he was writing about his own times, he did not express his judgments frankly, but used subtle and guarded language. The trouble with the ordinary run of men these days who discuss Xiongnu affairs is that they seek only for some temporary advantage, resorting to any kind of flattery in order to have their own views accepted, without considering what the effect may be on all parties concerned.Footnote 58
Sima Qian's best-known modern translator, Burton Watson, has no doubt that the historian's purpose in making these remarks about Confucius and the Spring and autumn annals is to warn his reader that he, too, is obliged to use ‘“guarded language” in his discussion of the Xiongnu problem’.Footnote 59 There is also a suggestion at the beginning of that chapter that Sima Qian is attempting to disguise any genuine anthropological interest he might have in the Xiongnu by arguing that he has only written this account in the best interests of Han foreign policy: ‘From the time of the Three Dynasties on, the Xiongnu have been a source of constant worry and harm to China. The Han have attempted to determine the Xiongnu's periods of strength and weakness so that it may adopt defensive measures or launch punitive expeditions as the circumstances allow. Thus I made “The Account of the Xiongnu”.’Footnote 60
After this ‘disclaimer’, the historian goes on to offer a comprehensive and surprisingly accurate (based on the information he had available) account of the lifeways, traditions, and environment of the nomads, which remains the most important primary source available today for an understanding of the Xiongnu confederation. The increasing frequency of interactions with the Xiongnu was not the only factor influencing Sima Qian, for it was also during the half-century reign of Wudi that China began actively to engage diplomatically and commercially with its Central Asian neighbouring states to the west, following the journey of envoy Zhang Qian (c.138–126 BCE), who was dispatched on a diplomatic journey to form a strategic alliance with the Xiongnu's old enemy, the Yuezhi confederation.Footnote 61 The historical impact of this was even more profound, both for China and for the entire Afro-Eurasian world zone. Zhang Qian's mission led directly to the expansion of trade routes that connected the Han with the various states of Central Asia, with India, with the steppe nomadic world, and eventually, via Parthia and Mesopotamia, with the Mediterranean Basin. These ‘Silk Roads’ were ultimately responsible not only for a substantial increase in commercial activity and wealth generation but also for levels of cultural exchange previously unknown in human history.
Sima Qian was just as aware of the significance of this diplomatic engagement as he was of the confrontations with the Xiongnu. He described the impact of the delivery of Zhang Qian's report on Wudi:
Thus the emperor learned of Dayuan, Daxia, Anxi, and the others, all great states rich in unusual products whose people cultivated the land and made their living in much the same way as the Chinese. All these states, he was told, were militarily weak and prized Han goods and wealth … If it were only possible to win over these states … the emperor thought, he could then extend his domain 10,000 li … and his might would become known to all the lands within the four seas.Footnote 62
The emperor grasped the implications of this report immediately, and if Zhang Qian deserves the credit for ‘opening up communications with the west’, the speed with which Wudi launched (and financed) follow-up missions must also be acknowledged: ‘After Zhang Qian achieved honour and position by opening up communications with the lands of the west (the emperor) called for volunteers from among the people and fitted out with attendants and dispatched anyone who came forward … in an effort to broaden out the area that had been opened to communication.’Footnote 63
In Sima Qian, Wudi found a historiographical match for his own expansionist worldview. Just as previous Chinese dynasties had been self-focused and isolationist, so generations of court historians had concerned themselves solely with the minutiae of astronomical records, legal documents, and the sayings of the emperors. In the hands of Sima Qian, however, who included not only detailed accounts of many of the ‘barbarian’ peoples of eastern and central Eurasia, but also a careful (and sometimes critical) analysis of Han foreign policy, Chinese historiography became more objective. Yet the historian seems to have been in no doubt that as the ‘barbarians of the west’ came to know the sophisticated, wealthy and cultured civilization of Han China, the effect on them would be profound:
But in the lands of the strange-mannered barbarians, in the distant regions of the foreigners, where our boats and carriages cannot penetrate and our people seldom set foot, the teachings of our government are as yet unknown and the wind of virtue which issues from our sovereign blows but faintly … Then do they look toward our land and cry out in anger, saying, ‘We have heard that in China there is a ruler of supreme benevolence, whose virtue is manifold and whose mercy is all-embracing, so that under him all beings find their just place. Why are we alone deprived of this blessing?’ On tiptoe they stand, gazing longingly like men in drought at a distant rainstorm.Footnote 64
It was Sima Qian's attempts to reconcile these two worlds that forced him to abandon the methodology of his predecessors and employ a very different approach to the traditional role of the Chinese historian, an approach, as noted below, pioneered by his father.
Prior to Sima Qian, Chinese histories had primarily been compiled by the literary upper class of government officials, usually under the patronage and supervision of the central government. The historian (shi) had based his work almost exclusively on an enormous mass of official records – ‘the sediment deposited by centuries of bureaucratic administration’ as Edward Zurcher put itFootnote 65 – and this tended to limit its focus. The idea of compiling basic annals emerged later, when court historians were increasingly required to keep records of the official activities of rulers for future reference.Footnote 66 This notion of the historian as ‘recorder’ of the emperor was a product of the Confucian tradition, which had envisaged a wang (king) flanked by a right and a left shi tasked to record the deeds and words of the ruler respectively.Footnote 67 During the Warring States era the Confucian view of the close co-dependence and mutual influence of the human and heavenly worlds began to transform the position of the shi. The historian was eventually seen as not only compiler but also moral interpreter of the past, and as such he became an expert observer of heavenly events, interpreting auspicious days for action based on planetary movements.
During the Early Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), these dual functions were institutionalized into the position of Taishihling, which can be translated as both ‘Grand Historian’ and ‘Grand Astrologer’. This was the post that Sima Qian inherited from his father Sima Tan; but just like his father Sima Qian was not content to limit himself to the traditional role of the shi. The younger Sima promised his father on his deathbed that he would complete their very different kind of history, one that in Nicola di Cosmo's words ‘had a worldview, was politically “engaged”, and did not refrain from interpretation and moral judgments’.Footnote 68 This could be no official standard history but rather a private work that would only be circulated after Sima Qian's death. His motivations for taking up this task have been debated for centuries, particularly in China, but, as di Cosmo further notes, ‘attempts to see him as an exponent of a given school of thought – Confucianism, Daoism, or something else – have not been particularly successful in interpreting the genesis of the Shiji’.Footnote 69
Sima Qian was in an excellent position to gather material for his history, having access to the official court records. Moreover, many chapters in the Shiji deal with the reign of Emperor Wudi himself, the period of Sima Qian's own lifetime. He was not, therefore, so much engaged in researching some romanticized past, or in merely copying and systematizing the written documents of ancient China, but rather writing about the emperor and court within which he spent most of his adult life.Footnote 70 Nor were these ordinary times; the reign of Wudi was a period of extraordinarily rapid change in China. The brutal civil strife of the Warring States era had ended with the accession of the first Qin emperor, Shi Huangdi (r. 221–210 BCE), who had succeeded in uniting a fragmented, feudal China. The legalist emperor had set out radically to reform China, but his short-lived dynasty collapsed fourteen years later. Civil war immediately erupted again, but ended in 206 BCE when Liu Bang fought his way to the throne, established the Han Dynasty, and installed himself as Emperor Gaozu. He and his successors then adopted something of a ‘hands-off’ approach to government, and China enjoyed more than half a century of respite from either radical reform or civil strife.
The accession of Wudi in 141, however, had a galvanizing impact on China, as Grant Hardy neatly describes:
In the course of his long reign, Emperor Wu took firm steps to do away with the feudal lords, initiated massive campaigns against the Xiongnu barbarians in the north, invaded the Korean peninsula, resettled 700,000 colonists in Central Asia, and launched expeditions to the south. He also reformed religious and political rituals, monopolized the minting of money, regulated markets, established state monopolies of the manufacture of salt and iron, raised taxes, and oversaw an increase in litigation and legal severity.Footnote 71
Sima Qian was troubled by the radical nature of some of Wudi's reforms, and there are hints throughout the Shiji suggesting dissatisfaction with the emperor. In addition to any general reservations the historian might have had about the direction of official policy, he also had strong personal reasons to be ill disposed towards Wudi.
Although the Taishiling was not expected to engage in political debate, Sima Qian felt compelled to do so in 99 BCE, with disastrous consequences. That year the Han general Li Ling was sent by Wudi on a punitive and initially successful campaign deep into Xiongnu territory, but when promised reinforcements and supplies failed to materialize, Li Ling had little alternative other than to surrender. Sima Qian offers a description of the circumstances in a letter he wrote to his friend Ren An: ‘They marched deep into barbarian territory, strode up to the ruler's court, and dangled the bait right before the tiger's jaws … They fought their way along for a thousand miles until their arrows were all gone and the road was blocked. The relief forces did not come …’.Footnote 72
Wudi, who had received initial reports of success, was bitterly disappointed when word of Li Ling's surrender reached the court. As Sima Qian describes it, ‘after a few days came word of his defeat, and because of it the emperor could find no flavour in his food and no delight in the deliberations of the court’.Footnote 73 Sima Qian, who was casually acquainted with Li Ling, defended him in court. The historian was eventually accused of ‘defaming the emperor’, a crime usually punishable by execution, although it was customary for the accused to either buy his way out or commit suicide. Without the resources necessary for the former, Sima Qian was offered a grim alternative to the latter when his sentence was commuted to castration. He accepted the appalling and humiliating punishment because it was the only option that would allow him to complete his history: ‘But the reason I have … continued to live, dwelling in vileness and disgrace without taking leave, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am ashamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity.’Footnote 74
After this experience, Sima Qian became more skilled at critically analysing imperial policy without actually appearing to do so. Yet, although attempts to discover implicit criticisms in the Shiji have occupied Chinese historiographers for centuries, as Hardy argues, ‘the Shiji is much more than a thinly (or even thickly) veiled diatribe’.Footnote 75 Indeed Sima Qian approved of many of Wudi's policies, particularly his re-establishment of Confucianism as the central ideology of the Han administration, and the historian must have been as aware as anyone in the empire that he was living through an era of unprecedented strength, vigour, and expansion in China. Perhaps Hardy sums up the Sima Qian's mood best when he writes: ‘in the end the Shiji offers a richly layered, complex portrayal of China's past, though there does seem to be a pessimistic current beneath the surface that is driving the project forward’.Footnote 76
In truth, Sima Qian's motives remain as indecipherable today as they probably did more than two thousand years ago. What is clear is the fact that his response to his own times created in the Shiji a vehicle capable of significantly expanding the breadth of Chinese historical thinking. What emerged was a work of genuine universal history that, in a similar way to the histories of Polybius and Diodorus, treats the affairs of the known world as though they are part of a unified, connected whole, and is also based on the premise that the whole story is more useful than its parts. The methodological and structural innovations that Sima Qian employed to realize these guiding principals, however, resulted in a different type of universal history from that produced by his Greco-Roman contemporaries.
Sima Qian's approach also differed from that of his near contemporary Ban Gu, who sometime around 36 CE commenced his own history of the Early Han, the Han Shu (‘Annals of the Early Han’).Footnote 77 This work was ultimately composed over eight decades, and was actually completed by Ban Gu's sister Ban Zhao (the first woman ever appointed to the position of Han Court Historian) sometime just before her death in 116 CE. In contrast to the Shiji, the Han Shu essentially offers an official ‘review’ of Han administration, and tends to be somewhat repetitive and statistical in nature. When read in conjunction with the Shiji, however, the Han Shu provides a wealth of reliable information that has proven absolutely invaluable to the historian of ancient China and Central Asia.
Both the Han Shu and the Shiji have the same purpose as virtually every other book of history ever written, including those of Polybius and Diodorus: to synthesize and make sense of the past. Yet the broad-ranging social and political changes that were occurring during Sima Qian's own lifetime necessitated for this historian a very different way of organizing historical knowledge. Any attempt to achieve a comprehensive synthesis meant that he had to first systematically collect and correlate an enormous amount of evidence, much of it documentary. Moving beyond the ‘official reporting’ approach of Ban Gu, Sima Qian instead evaluated and compared these documents through a highly developed critical methodology.
His Toynbee-like task of evidence collection, sorting, and harmonizing was complemented wherever possible by interviews with eyewitnesses and by personal visits to important sites. Realizing the importance of acquiring first-hand information, Sima Qian (like Herodotus perhaps) was one of the best-travelled historians of the ancient world.Footnote 78 When he was twenty he undertook a five-year journey through much of southern China, and as a young civil servant he was a member of a several expeditions to the west and south. Later, as a member of Wudi's official retinue, he personally accompanied the emperor on a number of inspection tours. Of particular relevance to his study of the Xiongnu was a journey that he undertook in 110 BCE with Wudi to inspect the Great Qin walls of the northern border.Footnote 79 What emerges from all this journeying is no mere travelogue, for the historian never lost sight of his purpose in accumulating these experiences – to record for posterity, as he puts it, both the ‘outside and the inside stories’ of events.
Sima Qian then used the enormous amount of material he had gathered in an attempt to create a comprehensive, unified history of the entire world as he knew it.Footnote 80 After accumulating so much information he was faced with the problem of how to structure the material in a way that made sense. Unlike Polybius and Diodorus, he decided not to present his history in the form of a chronological narrative, but rather to use five distinct structural genres to explore his universe. The first of these genres are the ‘Basic annals’, in which the historian describes the major political events according to the years of the reigns of all emperors from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Early Han Dynasties, through to Wudi. The term that the historian himself used to describe the annals – pen chi – offers an insight into his motivation in constructing them. Pen means a ‘seeking out of the bases of events’, while chi, which can mean ‘thread’, suggests putting these events in order, ‘as silk cloth has many threads’. The historian also hoped that the ‘Basic annals’ would become guidelines for ideal government (or ‘guidelines for posterity’).Footnote 81 The second structural genre is the laying out of systematic ‘Chronological tables’, which list the major events that occurred in the reigns of individual emperors. From 841 BCE onwards, there is at least one chronological table for every single year down to his own lifetime. These tables are a triumph of organization and are of great value to historians even today.
The third genre consists of ‘Treatises’, essentially investigative monographs in which Sima Qian analyses the economic and cultural history of a wide range of peoples, including many of China's ‘barbarian’ neighbours. The natural world is also thoroughly investigated in the treatises, which consider subjects such as the cosmos, spirits, mountains, and hydrography, and their impact upon human affairs. Sima Qian believed that human-constructed rituals and conventions (including music and religious rituals) derive their power from the way in which they reflect the deeper rhythms and harmony of the cosmos. For example, the ‘Treatise on the balanced standard’ on one level appears to be an investigation of the impact of currency fluctuations on human economic endeavours. The natural cycles of the cosmos are never far away, however: ‘But it has ever been the law of change that when things reach their period of greatest flourishing, they must begin to decay’.Footnote 82 Confucian ethics are also bound up with these processes, leading the historian to offer a view of history that is almost cyclical, or at least endlessly repetitive: we find periods of rude simplicity and periods of refinement alternating with each other endlessly.Footnote 83
The fourth structural genre employed by Sima Qian is a series of chapters on ‘Hereditary houses’, which offer potted histories of many political and historical figures in Chinese history, including feudal lords, kings, and influential government officials. Most of the hereditary house chapters tell a narrative story in more or less chronological order. This is also true for the various ‘Biographies’ that are scattered throughout the Shiji, and which constitute Sima Qian's fifth structural genre. In these he conveys stories from the lives of many of the same figures found in the ‘Hereditary houses’, often based on material and oral evidence that he had accumulated during his own extensive travels. These biographical portraits allow the historian to exercise moral judgements about the behaviours of many of the key figures in Chinese history, and also to comment once again upon the links that exist between the (super)natural environment and the world of men. He also uses the biographies to further contrast his own times with more enlightened eras in the past (as he perceived them), once more holding Wudi up to the highest standards of Confucianist ethics, and occasionally finding him wanting. The annals, chronological tables, hereditary houses, and biographies each begin with the legendary period of earliest Chinese history, then trace events through to the reign of Wudi.
For the Western reader, the complex structure of the Shiji can be difficult to read, much more so than the works of Polybius and Diodorus, or even the Han Shu, because, as Hardy puts it, these accounts ‘do not display a consistent level of coherence or followability’.Footnote 84 The biographies and later hereditary house chapters do often consist of coherent narratives, where events unfold with clear consequences. But the annals, early hereditary houses, and particularly the chronological tables have no real storyline, and subsequent details seem to bear little relationship to earlier events in the same chapter, so that ‘events frequently occur with no explicit causes and little effect, and unexplained incidents abound’.Footnote 85 Equally confusing for the Western reader is the fact that the historian sometimes offers multiple versions of the same event, with details that often contradict each other. An example of this is Sima Qian's various accounts of the serious confrontation that occurred between the first Han emperor, Gaozu, and the Xiongnu in 200 BCE, an event often referred to as the ‘Mayi Incident’.Footnote 86 At least eight different chapters of the Shiji deal with the same incident (including one of the annals, one treatise, two hereditary house chapters, and four biographiesFootnote 87) but the details differ significantly depending on the particular focus of each chapter. As Jonathon Markley has pointed out, ‘a close comparison between the many different versions of these events reveals problems with some aspects of practically every event during the campaign’.Footnote 88
Yet while these inconsistencies and contradictions are challenging and sometimes troubling, there is also a methodological beauty in the structure. Sima Qian has allowed himself the luxury of revisiting particular events, often on several different occasions, in order to say something different about them based on the intent of each particular chapter. What he seems to be suggesting is that historical processes are not as clear-cut as his Greco-Roman counterparts suggest, given their structural preference for clean compartmentalization and a neater and tidier account of events. Sima Qian reminds us that the same event can have a very different meaning in different contexts, which also depends on who is doing the witnessing or interpreting. Not only are there often multiple layers of meaning in a historical event, but individuals can sometimes have multiple intentions for their actions. This is a far more subtle form of historical analysis than simply offering one single interpretation of events or human motivations, and it reflects a highly original conception of history that Sima Qian was able to bring to successful realization.Footnote 89 It also contrasts markedly with the approach taken by the authors of the Han Shu, which tends to be much more statistical, matter-of-fact, and clean-cut in its descriptions of events. The Shiji, to paraphrase Hardy, must be recognized as nothing less than an audacious attempt to reconstruct the past as a microcosm of the real world, to create a work of history that is as open-ended, multi-layered, and bewilderingly ambiguous as the complex world in which it was conceived.Footnote 90
Only a historian of Sima Qian's vision and commitment would have been able to revolutionize the art of history writing in China single-handedly, transforming it from a staid, impersonal collection of often unrelated facts into a vehicle capable of extraordinary scope, profound analysis, and cultural inclusiveness. The influence of the Shiji on Chinese historiography was not felt immediately, however. Because of the politically ‘dangerous’ nature of much of the material, the text was hidden in the residence of Sima Qian's daughter for about twenty years after the historian's death, and was only disseminated during the reign of Xuandi (73–48 BCE). The earliest handwritten copy of the Shiji was produced during the sixth century CE, and the first printed edition was published during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 CE). Subsequent influential printed editions followed during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279 CE) and in the Ming Dynasty between 1521 and 1620.
Conclusion
In both eastern and western ancient Eurasia, different visions of universal history proved well suited for the description of processes occurring on broad spatial and temporal scales, including, notably, the expansion of complex states. The leading historians of the ancient world wove detailed descriptions of these processes into complex narratives that synthesized events into an organic whole, which resulted in a conception of history that added up to something more than a mere recounting of these events. The structural approaches used by the historians differed, but a link between their expansive conceptions and the magnitude of the events themselves is obvious and crucial. Polybius is explicit that his work was motivated by the sheer scale of the conflict between Carthage and Rome, and the subsequent success of the Romans in bringing ‘almost the whole of the inhabited world’ under their rule. Similarly, Diodorus only began to arrange the complex events he considers in the Library of history into an ‘orderly body’ after the reality of Roman success in the Mediterranean had obviously and (so the historian believed) uniquely brought the affairs of the inhabited world together ‘as though they were those of a single state’. And Sima Qian's determination to reach out from inside the cultural confines of ancient China and incorporate knowledge about the rest of his known world was only made possible by the fact that it was in his own lifetime that China began to engage actively with the rest of Eurasia for the first time.
These are conceptions of history particularly suited to their times and contexts. As the regional focus of individual city-states in the Mediterranean was replaced by increasing cross-cultural awareness and trans-regional expansion and conflict, so the methodology of recounting these processes also had to expand. And when the conflict was on a hitherto unseen scale, as was the case between the Carthaginians and the Romans, so the histories produced by Polybius and Diodorus had to be similarly expansive in scale and shape. In eastern Eurasia, once the envoy Zhang Qian had returned to Wudi's court and delivered his report on vast regions of Central Asia previously unknown to the Han, Sima Qian had no alternative other than to conceive of an approach to writing history that allowed him to incorporate this bewilderingly complicated new knowledge into his great work.
This trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness in history writing that is exemplified by the work of these Greco-Roman and Han Chinese historians continued to blossom over subsequent millennia in both the Eastern and Western historiographical traditions. Similarly monumental and comprehensive histories were produced in Song, Ming, and Qing Dynasty China; by Christian ecclesiastical and Islamic historians; and much later by historians such as H. G. Wells and Oswald Spengler, who, writing in a later period of imperial expansion, similarly argued that the only way to account for the construction and near self-destruction of Western culture in a catastrophic ‘global’ war was through a universalist conception.
For more than two millennia a universal approach to the writing of history remained the most highly valued and influential conception in the historiographical traditions of China, Europe, and the Islamic world, but it ultimately lost favour to more nationally focused history writing in the nineteenth century. Now, in the twenty-first century, when the affairs of the whole world really have become a ‘connected whole’, some form of universal history is once again uniquely placed to explain the relationship of the myriad parts to the organic, interconnected whole. In the same way that the approach of Polybius and Diodorus was the most appropriate to describe epic, inter-regional events that unfolded in the Mediterranean Basin more than two thousand years ago, and that of Sima Qian was ideal to explain China's expansion into Central Asia to eventually join the Afro-Eurasian world system, so world history, global history, big history, and other successors to these universalist prototypes remain the very best tools at our disposal today to, as Polybius so succinctly put it, ‘obtain a view at once clear and complete; and thus secure both the profit and the delight of history’.Footnote 91
Craig Benjamin is an Associate Professor of History in the Frederik J. Meijer Honors College at Grand Valley State University. He is author of The Yuezhi: origins, migration and the conquest of northern Bactria (2007) and co-author of Big history: between nothing and everything (2013). He is also editor of Volume 4 of the forthcoming Cambridge World History, and current President (2014–15) of the World History Association.
