chapters, then, analyze the mechanics and the implications of the Romans’ past and
present being charted onto these Panhellenic grids of time. In this story, as Erich
Gruen kept reminding me, it is often impossible to tell what was happening at the
initiative of the Greeks and what was happening at the initiative of the Romans.
For Rome to become a world empire it was essential that the Romans become part
of the time schemes of the Greeks, and the work that went on to make this happen
was collaborative work. The project of synchronization was a technical challenge
of a high order for them, and it provides us with a demanding test case in the his-
tory of Roman Hellenization, as the Romans and Greeks made sense of the con-
tours of the Roman past and present through media that had been devised for
Greek cities and empires. We shall be considering what was at stake in the choices
that were made in these synchronistic patternings: how were the Romans mapped
onto a Mediterranean past that had been surveyed by Greek chronography and
historiography, and which distinctive patterns of Greek time were adapted for the
Romans as their empire grew until it had physically embraced and subsumed all of
the focal points for Greek chronology?
The topic of synchronism is a large one and could have engrossed all six lectures
and chapters. In the first chapter I outline the issue and show why it matters, giv-
ing an outline of the main developments in ancient chronography insofar as they
impinge on synchronism, with the chronological endpoint being the Christian
chronicles of Eusebius and Jerome. The chapter concludes with an overview of the
synchronistic essay of Aulus Gellius, from around 180 c.e.We have nothing but
fragments surviving of the many large volumes Gellius was working with, and his
four pages are the only intact sequence of writing devoted to the subject that sur-
vives from all the wreckage of pagan chronography. His snapshot synchronistic
chapter, with its panorama of some seven hundred years of history, is the most eco-
nomical introduction we have to this fascinating and indispensable aspect of the
organization of time in the ancient world. It is valuable to some extent precisely
because Gellius is not an especially original operator in this domain; his text shows
just how much work this tool could do, even in the hands of someone who was not
particularly exerting himself. After looking at the scholars and antiquarians in the
first chapter, in the second chapter we shall look in more detail at the story of how
the time schemes of the Greeks and Romans worked to accommodate the Romans’
unprecedented rise to dominance over the whole world.
The second pair of chapters examines two crucial divisions in past time.
Chapter 3 treats one of the most important of the ancient world ’s time divisions,
between the time of myth and history. Here the test case is the foundation of the
Introduction. 5