[orwin]

> And if you want to read for information, you’re almost certainly going to get better information by reading a modern history of Rome than by reading Polybius.

It's not 'almost certainly'. Modern history books written by academics contain an historiography, references to archeological researchs, reference to archives when some exist (remarquably, while the French revolutionary council archived their discussions and those were kept since 1792, no historian reference them before 1998, and since then, every academic book do :/), linguistic research, economics (local economy: what was produced, what was imported) and probably other fields I never recognised/took interest in.