his time, of identifying significant moments by reference to the well-known figures
involved.”
- Mazzarino 1966 is an excellent introduction to this interval-spacing mentality,
in the section on time in ancient historiography, which is incomprehensibly tucked
away at the back of his masterpiece as the forty-nine-page-long footnote 555 in vol. 2.2:
note especially pp. 439, 446 – 47, and 448, with his favorite reference to Hor. Carm.
3.19.1 – 2, Quantum distet ab Inacho/Codrus(where see also the enlightening note of
Williams 1969). See too the lucid discussion of Möller 2004, 170 – 71, and Möller and
Luraghi 1995, 8 – 10, touching also on the related issue of the ancient historians’ prac-
tice of linking up the beginning of their narrative to the end of a predecessor’s (for
which see the charts in Marincola 1997, 289 – 92).
28.FGrH241 F 1a. Compare the use of the war against Perseus of Macedon (171
b.c.e.) as an interval marker in Cato’s Origines(F. 49 Peter) and in Sallust (Hist.fr. 8).
Especially for Cato, who could not date by consular names thanks to his refusal to use
personal names in his narrative, it was important to have a hook that was recent and
memorable. - We return to this issue below, in chapter 5.
- A famous embassy, this, memorable for the confrontation between Roman
imperial power and Greek theoreticians of power: see Purcell 1995, 146 – 47; Zetzel
- Note how the character of Atticus in Cicero’s Brutusdescribes his Liber Annalis,
a book that we would call a chronography, implying a collection of dates: Atticus calls
it a “memorial of achievements and officeholders” (rerum et magistratuum memoriam,
19). - This is the general theme of Wilcox’s important book: particularly concise for-
mulations in Wilcox 1987, 9, 13, 74. - The phrase “absolute time” is that of Wilcox (1987).
- Other clear-headed accounts include Cornell 1995, 399 – 402 and Möller and
Luraghi 1995. Stern (2003) offers an excellent approach to these issues via ancient
Judaism, finding there the same commitment to “process” rather than “absolute time”
that Hunter (1982) finds in Greek historiography. - Hunter (1982) made great progress on an original path, so it is not patronizing
to observe that she remains still, half-consciously, invested in the idea that Herodotus
or Thucydides really knew about dates in our sense but are more interested in their
place within the “process,” while Wilcox and Shaw see that the relativizing process is
what there is: “Classical authors possessed no cognitive awareness of absolute chronol-
ogy, nor had they a means of identifying each day by a universally acknowledged date.
What is more important, they did not expect to do so, or to be able to do so, nor did
they think it necessary” (Shaw 2003, 25). Accordingly, Hunter (1982, 254) cites
Herodotus’s mention of Calliades as the archon at Athens when Xerxes invaded Attica
notes to pages 13 – 15. 221