In 1985 the Cambridge University Press published a score of my separata in a volume entitled Selected Papers. The present volume contains a further nineteen papers, mostly dealing with Polybius. The majority of these were originally published after 1985, but I have included a few earlier ones, for which there was no room in the earlier volume. I have prefaced them with a newly written chapter, in which I have attempted a survey of the main topics and directions apparent in Polybian studies over the last twenty-five years and have indicated how the papers appearing here fit in with those trends. These papers are arranged in four sections. First, there are nine historical and geographical papers; next, five concerned with Polybius as a historian; then, three on Polybius and Rome; and finally two dealing with the later significance of Polybius, the first in seventeenth-century England at the time of Dryden and the second in twentieth-century Italy, as seen in the writings of the historian Gaetano De Sanctis.

In one or two places, and especially in papers which involve Polybius' views on the Roman constitution, there is some slight repetition; this is unfortunate, but was inevitable if the argument was to be clearly presented in each paper. After full consideration, it seemed better to reprint the articles as they were written and not to abbreviate them in a way likely to cause confusion in any reference to them.