Polybius of Megalopolis was the son of Lycortas, the friend and partisan of Philopoemen, who had served the Achaean league in several capacities: as ambassador to Rome in B.C. 189, along with Diophanes, on the question of the war with Sparta,[4] and to Ptolemy Epiphanes in B.C. 186,[5] and finally as Strategus in B.C. 184-183. Of the year of his birth we cannot be certain. He tells us that he was elected to go on embassy from the league to Ptolemy Epiphanes in the year of the death of that monarch (B.C. 181), although he was below the legal age.[6] But we do not know for certain what that age was; although it seems likely that it was thirty, that apparently being the age at which a member of the league exercised his full privileges.[7] But assuming this, we do not know how much under that age he was. Two years previously (B.C. 183) he had carried the urn at Philopoemen’s funeral. This was an office usually performed by quite young men (νεανίσκοι)[8], probably not much over twenty years old. As we know that he lived to write a history of the Numantine war, which ended B.C. 133[9], and that he was eighty-two at the time of his death[10], we shall not, I think, be probably far wrong if we place his birth in B.C. 203 and his death in B.C. 121 as Casaubon does, who notes that the latter is just sixteen years before the birth of Cicero. But though this is a good working hypothesis, it is very far from being a demonstrated fact. Between B.C. 181-168 he was closely allied with his father in politics; and if we wish to have any conception of what he was doing, it is necessary to form some idea of the state of parties in the Peloponnese at the time.