Frank Walbank was the last surviving member of a small group of outstanding scholars who raised the standard of British-based scholarship in the history of classical antiquity from respectability to international distinction. The transformation came first in Roman history, then in Greek: Walbank’s work on Polybius combined the two strands.

Frank William Walbank’s personal memoirs vividly depict the degree of social mobility then open to a clever boy, born into a “Bingley clan” of small shopkeepers and mill-workers. Ability, scholarships and family and school support took him to Bradford Grammar School, to Cambridge (Peterhouse) and a first-class degree in 1931, and a postgraduate year which astonishingly, yielded a book-length biography, quickly published. After a schoolteaching year in Manchester, appointment to a university post at Liverpool opened the way to successive internal promotions, first to the chair of Latin as successor to his influential mentor Sir James Mountford, and then to the Rathbone chair of ancient history and classical archaeology which he held till retirement.

That retirement was nominal, for after a move to Cambridge his unimpaired intellectual and physical vitality and a supportive family permitted him intense activity as lead editor of several volumes of the revised Cambridge Ancient History, as joint or sole author of two important books on Hellenistic Macedonia and the Hellenistic World, and a stream of invited lectures, papers, reviews and reflections which flowed almost till the end.

Throughout his life the bulk of this activity was devoted to the history and historiography of the post-Alexander period of ancient Greek history. By 1930 the publication of newly found inscriptions and papyri was transforming access to a period which had suffered from comparison with the Golden Age of 5th and 4th-century BC Greece; Walbank was among the first to see and seize the opportunity. The history came first, with biographies of two first-rank figures, Aratos of Sicyon (1933) and King Philip V of Macedon (1940). Lucid, comprehensive and judicious, they became and remain standard works of reference.

Behind them, however, lay the historian Polybius, whose surviving text, still substantial though a pitiful torso of the original 40 books, had had no commentary since the 1790s. From 1942 onwards Walbank set himself to fill that gap. Vol I, covering the fully extant books I-VI, came out in 1957, II in 1967 and III in 1979. Within that invaluable, peculiarly Anglo-Saxon genre of detailed “historical commentary” on ancient historical texts, they are reckoned to have set the gold standard: his appreciation of Johann Schweighauser’s 18th-century edition — “the more one works with this, the more one comes to admire its thoroughness and sound common sense” — applies with equal force to his own.

Commentary did not displace history. A leading work on The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West (1946), preceded by a notable chapter in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, reflected his radical Marxist past and gave him a sympathetic reception in Iron Curtain Europe. His later Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, became, as Polybius (1972), the standard book on the author he had made his own.

Beside papers on Greek federalism, his synthesis The Hellenistic World (1981), already accessible in seven other languages and with an Arabic translation imminent, has become the first port of call for a generation of students.

As status and seniority accrued, so did responsibilities and honours. Judicious but always human, within his own institution he left an unsurpassed reputation as a safe pair of hands, as chairman of endless university committees, as public orator and as dean of faculty. The same gift for sane chairmanship was recognised nationally with the presidency of the Classical Association and of the Roman Society, while his recognition by the British Academy at an unusually early age was merely the first of many honours.

Three achievements stand out. First, he not only accorded the third great Greek historian the attention and respect he deserved, but also contributed substantially to the historical revaluation of the period and events which Polybius narrated.

The second, reflecting long involvement in extramural work, wartime classes to soldiers and a conviction that any history, however remote in time, had its relevance, was to show how even complex scholarship could be presented clearly and unpretentiously.

The third, known to all who knew him in his various capacities as well as to his loving family, was quite simply to be an exemplar of human qualities. In the words of two senior Liverpool administrative colleagues, he was “a man of wisdom, common sense and humour” and “a wonderful human being unaffected by his own eminence”.

Professor Frank Walbank, CBE, historian of classical antiquity, was born on December 10, 1909. He died on October 23, 2008, aged 98