POLYAeNUS, a Macedonian, lived at Rome as a rhetorician and pleader in the 2d century. When the Parthian War (162-165 a.d.) broke out, Polyaenus, too old to share in the campaign, dedicated to the emperors Marcus Antoninus and Lucius Verus a work, still extant, called Strategica or Strategemata, an historical collection of stratagems and maxims of strategy written in Greek and strung together in the form of anecdotes. It is not strictly confined to warlike stratagems, but includes also examples of wisdom, courage, and cunning drawn from civil and political life. The work is uncritically and negligently written, but is nevertheless important on account of the extracts it has preserved from histories now lost. It is divided into eight books, and originally contained nine hundred anecdotes, of which eight hundred and thirty-three are extant. Polyaenus intended to write a history of the Parthian War, but there is no evidence that he did so. His works on Macedonia, on Thebes, and on tactics (if indeed this be not identical with the Strategics') are lost....
His Strategics seems to have been highly esteemed by the Roman emperors and to have been handed down by them as a sort of heirloom. From Rome it passed to Constantinople; at the end of the 9th century it was diligently studied by Leo VI., who himself wrote a work on tactics; and in the middle of the 10th century Constantine Porphyrogenitus mentioned it as one of the most valuable books in the imperial library. It was used by Stobaeus, Suidas, and the anonymous author of the work πepl απίστων {Mythographi Greed, ed. Westermann, p. 323). It is arranged as follows :—bks. i., ii., iii., stratagems occurring in Greek history, from the mythical times of Dionysus and Hercules onward; bk. iv., stratagems of the Macedonian kings and successors of Alexander the Great; bk. v., stratagems occurring in the history of Sicily and the Greek islands and colonies; bk. vi., stratagems of whole peoples (Carthaginians, Lacedaemonians, Argives, &c.), together with some of individuals (Philopoemen, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, &c. ); bk. vii., stratagems of the barbarians (Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Thracians, Scythians, Celts); bk. viii., stratagems of Romans and women. This distribution is not, however, observed very strictly. Of the negligence or haste with which the work was written there are many instances: e.g., he confounds Dionysius the elder and Dionysius the younger, Mithradates satrap of Artaxerxes and Mithradates the Great, Scipio the elder and Scipio the younger; he mixes up the stratagems of Caesar and Pompey; he brings into immediate connexion events which were totally distinct; he narrates some events twice over, with variations according to the different authors from whom he draws. Though he usually abridges, he occasionally amplifies arbitrarily the narratives of his authorities. He never mentions his authorities, but amongst authors still extant he used Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus, Plutarch, Frontinus, and Suetonius; amongst authors of whom only fragments now remain he drew upon Ctesias, Ephorus, Timaeus, Phylarchus, and perhaps Aristagoras, Dinon, Heraclides, Megasthenes, and N icolaus Damascenus. His style is clear, but monotonous and inelegant. He heaps up participles and falls alternately into the opposite faults of accumulating and totally omitting conjunctions. A glaring instance of these faults is to be found in bk. iii. 9, 33. In the forms of his words he generally follows Attic usage.
His work was first printed in a Latin translation by Justus Vulteius (Basel, 1549); the Greek text was first edited by Casaubon (Leyden, 1589), but mainly from a very inferior MS. Korais in his edition (Paris, 1809) corrected the text in many places. The best edition is that of Wölfflin (Teubner, 1860), whose preface may be consulted with advantage.
