Polybius was a Greek freedom fighter from Megalopolis, a town in the Achaean League, a political group of small states in the Peloponnesus. He was among a thousand Achaeans who were sent as hostages to Rome after the Roman victory at Pydna over Macedon in 168 BCE. He remained in Rome for nearly a generation. There, Polybius became a close confidant of Scipio Africanus the Younger, a general and politician of the ancient Roman Republic, and thus he was well connected to the Roman military aristocracy. Soon after Polybius’s return to Greece, the Romans dissolved the Achaean League, and Polybius played a role as intermediary. He wrote many works, the most famous of which is The Histories, a treatise on the rise and success of the Roman state and its expansion in the Mediterranean. Although Polybius wrote more than forty volumes in this work, only five have survived in their entirety.