Walbank, F.W. 1909-2008 (F. William Walbank, Frank Walbank, Frank W. Walbank, Frank William Walbank)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 10, 1909, in Bingley, England; died October 23, 2008. Classicist, historian, educator, editor, and author. Walbank wrote about the history of the Roman Empire from its earliest days to its bitter end. He was able to do this, in large part, because of the work of an ancient predecessor: the Greek scholar Polybius. Walbank was respected for his work on classical history, but he was renowned for his epic work on Polybius. Polybius was a distinguished scholar of history, royalty, politics, geography, and military affairs. In the year 167 B.C., as a political prisoner and possibly an espionage agent, he was exiled to the Roman Empire, where he wrote dozens of volumes on the ascendancy of that sprawling empire. He also chronicled his own daily life as an exile, describing the people and events around him in great detail, but for centuries little of his writing was believed to have survived. When newly discovered inscriptions and papyrus documents of ancient Greece began to emerge in the West in 1930, Walbank was one of the first scholars permitted to examine them, and they led him to the remaining original works of Polybius. Walbank set out to update the scholarly commentary on the documents, last collected prior to the year 1800, and his three-volume set A Historical Commentary on Polybius (1957-1979) became his magnum opus, occupying the author for twenty years. During these years Walbank also taught Latin, ancient history, and classical archaeology at the University of Liverpool, beginning in 1934 and ending with his formal retirement as Rathbone Professor in 1977. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964 and the University of California at Berkeley in 1971. Walbank's research continued in retirement, enriching classical libraries with his expertise in the form of several books on ancient Greece and Rome. Walbank's writings include The Awful Revolution: The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West (1969), the three-volume work A History of Macedonia (1972-1988), Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiology (1985), and Polybius, Rome, and the Hellenistic World: Essays and Reflections (2002).

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PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), November 13, 2008, p. 75.