폴리비오스의『역사』에서 세계사의 이론과 실제

초록

“His view of history is pragmatic and it is universal.” So was Polybian historiography characterized in brevity by Bury in the beginning of the last century. Yet, a century’s historiography shows that the second feature has been, by and large, neglected in comparison with the first. It has never been discussed as an independent subject, and as far as I know, only Pédech and Sacks dealt it respectively in a chapter of their books. This paper wishes to fill in this relative vacuum in two ways. First, it tries to provide a synthetical understanding of the subject by dealing with its cardinal aspects: namely the place of Polybius’ Histories in the context of ancient universal history (chapter 4) as well as the theory and practice of Polybian universal history (chapters 1-2). Secondly, it proposes a new idea of how the concept of universal history creeps into Histories as a second thought. This attempt signifies an invocation of the ill-fated critical spirit of Laqueur, who had entertained the same suspicion that I happened to have while reading the text,though I end up with manifestly different results. The chapter 3 is devoted to the matter, and wishes to draw attention at least to the fact that Laqueur’s suspicion is still worth attention.

키워드