Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

While Polybius of Megalopolis may not be a household name in the 21st century, there is an eeriness with which elements of his Histories – a ‘monumental’ work written in the second century BCE – are all-too-(disturbingly)-familiar. This presentation calls attention to such mirrored intersections while conducting a deeper, anti-imperial, and empathetic (un)reading of an ancient text-and-author. To experience Polybius’ Histories is to engage with the conundrums of imperial citizenship. It is to see how interlocking artifices have been filled with the co-complicities of pain, harm, fragility, and anxiety, thereby carving pathways out of such concepts (or ‘mobile essentialisms’) as “empire,” “modernity,” and “the West.” It is to grapple with and against ‘straightforward’ narratives regarding individual and collective lived-experiences of systemic and epistemic formations of “safety” and “security.” And it is likewise to be injured – while also inflicting injury – in desiring salvation, while running the risk of simply reiterating neo-imperial modes of (re)’mastery’ – and thereby missing the truest potentialities of-and-for liberatory futures. . For Polybius, the “moment” entailed what has since been all-too-simplistically (and problematically) understood as a “fall” of a ‘Hellenistic’ (“Greek”) international system to the “rise” of Rome as an “empire.” Such an overly reductive narrative arc is a historiographical product of which Polybius was/is part-and-parcel. This paper therefore rethinks the Histories as an epic testimony, as a written artifact(ory) of the epistemic ruptures of surviving empire, always-in-the-making via arts of annihilation. In the process, it highlights rebelliously-poetic potentialities, beyond banalities of the past-as-future.