Less than two centuries after the death of Alexander the Great, Greece had been reduced to a province of the nascent Roman empire. In Polybius and the Roman Conquest of Greece , Fustel de Coulanges explores the key social and political conditions that led to Greece's subjugation, from the fierce divisions which had long plagued Ancient Greek society, to the historical disunity between the Hellenic city-states. Uncompromising in his analysis, Coulanges details the fractured resistance to Roman conquest through the lens of Polybius' writings, exploring how "the last historian of a free Greece" would ultimately come to view Rome as the solution to the deep disorders of his homeland. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges was a French historian best known for his work The Ancient City.