the most attractive hypothesis is that he had Carthaginian informants who gave
him this date for the foundation of their city, and that he moved the Roman date to
fit accordingly.^138
What was Timaeus up to with his synchronized down-dating of the foundation
of the two great rival cities? Secure answers are impossible because of the state of
the evidence. It is disturbing that Dionysius of Halicarnassus had no idea what
procedure Timaeus was following, and he knew a great deal more about Roman
chronology and about Timaeus than we do.^139 But it is possible to make some sug-
gestions as to what may have been at stake in his innovation.
First of all, fixing a foundation date at all is a significant statement, because it
makes Rome look like a proper city in Greek terms, and not simply like a place that
just evolved in a bumbling kind of way. Corroboration of this hypothesis comes in
the next century, for Apollodorus’s Chronicacontained no date for the foundation
of Rome, despite the fact that the book was published decades after the conquest
of Greece by the Romans. Gabba first pointed out an important implication of this
omission: it “carried the implication that the beginnings of the city were humble
and obscure and could not be given a firm date.”^140 From our perspective we can
see that Apollodorus was absolutely right, even if for the wrong reasons; but this
helps put in perspective the fact that Timaeus was making a significant claim in for
the first time giving the city of Rome a fixed year of foundation at all. In shifting
the foundation from fable toward history, Timaeus is denying that Rome is “un-
like” a proper city, as it is if its origins are fabulous; he is making it “like” by grant-
ing it a real beginning, one with participation in significant, charted, dated time —
time shared with Greece.
Timaeus’s Sicilian origins are likely to have played an important part in how he
conceived of the city’s place in time. The earlier versions are mainly looking west
from Greece “proper,” but Timaeus is a Sicilian, with his eye on Carthage, espe-
cially Carthage in Sicily, and also with his eye on Rome ’s closeness to Sicily in the
light of its assumption of control over Magna Graecia, a process that the Romans
completed in a scant fifteen years, from 285 to 272 b.c.e.The Greek tradition
had always been that when they got to the Western Mediterranean the Phoenicians
and Romans were already there.^141 Timaeus is working with mid- to late-eighth-
century dates for Greek colonization in the West, and it looks as if he wants to link
Rome and Carthage as the two really important non-Greek powers of the West,
peoples who were already there, though not by very much, when the Greeks
arrived.
Although he down-dated the foundation of Rome from the time of Troy to
The Intervention of Timaeus. 93