contained in the family archives of the Scipios, as to the Hannibalian war, and especially as to the campaigns in Spain.[86] Such were some of the means by which Polybius was enabled to obtain accurate and trustworthy information. [Sidenote: Use of previous writers by Polybius.] It remains to inquire how far Polybius availed himself of the writings of others. He looks upon the study of books as an important part of an historian’s work, but, as we have seen, not the most important. His practice appears to have been conformable to his theory. The greater part of his information he gained from personal observation and personal inquiry. Nevertheless, some of his history must have been learnt from books, and very little of it could have been entirely independent of them. Still, as far as we have the means of judging from the fragments of his work that have come down to us, his obligations to his predecessors are not as extensive as that of most of those who wrote after him; nor is the number of those to whom he refers great.[87] [Sidenote: The Punic wars.] Of his preliminary sketch contained in books 1 and 2, the first book, containing the account of the first Punic war and the Mercenary war, appears to have been derived mainly from the writings of Fabius Pictor (b. circ. B.C. 260), and Philinus of Agrigentum (contemporary and secretary of Hannibal). He complains that they were violent partisans, the one of Rome, the other of Carthage.[88] But by comparing the two, and checking both by documents and inscriptions at Rome, he, no doubt, found sufficient material for his purpose. [Sidenote: Illyrians and Gauls.] [Sidenote: Achaia.] The second book contains an account of the origin of the war between Rome and Illyricum; of the Gallic or Celtic wars from the earliest times; and a sketch of Achaean history to the end of the Cleomenic war. The first two of these must have been compiled with great labour from various public documents and family records, as well as in part from Pictor. The sketch of Achaean history rested mainly, as far as it depends on books, on the Memoirs of Aratus; while he studied only to refute the writings of Phylarchus the panegyrist of Cleomenes. He complains of the partiality of Phylarchus: but in this part of the history it was perhaps inevitable that his own views should have been coloured by the prejudices and prepossessions of a politician, and one who had been closely connected from boyhood with the patriotic Achaean party, led by Philopoemen, which was ever at enmity with all that Cleomenes did his utmost to establish. [Sidenote: Sicilian history.]