Tom Holland

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We'll be back next week, Laura and me, with The Skating Minister by Henry Rayburn.

And if you want to hear that and the whole series, well, you know what you've got to do.

Yes, even though he was a Greek.

And slightly disappointed that you didn't follow up your brilliant impression of Livy in our last episode by doing a Greek accent for Polybius.

But you ducked it.

Yeah, so Polybius, for reasons that we will come to,

He knows Rome very, very well indeed.

And he's particularly close to the family of the Scipios.

And they are the family that, as we heard in the previous episode, they played the kind of the leading role in the great Rome's great death struggle with Hannibal.

So when it comes to the Punic Wars, Polybius is pretty clearly team Rome.

But even so, as we heard in that opening passage, he can't help but admire Hannibal.

And the reasons are self-evident.

Hannibal is the man who has led a great army over the Alps into Italy.

He's killed 100,000 Romans, perhaps, in three terrible and tactically brilliant battles.

And who, as Polybius noted in that passage, had kept a force made up of many disparate peoples in the field for a decade and more.

in a foreign land separated by the seas from Carthage, his native city.

So an unbelievable achievement.

Now, the Romans, unlike Polybius, were not generally in the habit of praising Hannibal.

And the reason for that is that they feared and hated him too much.