This paragraph is taken from Feeney 2002, 15 – 16, with kind permission of
Michael Paschalis; see there for fuller discussion of Cicero’s (and Horace ’s) attitudes
to cross-cultural comparison.
Habinek 1998, 95.
103.OLDs.v. §4, “(mil.) to extend in line of battle, deploy.” The use ofordinesis cru-
cial to the metaphor, for explicareseems to have “an almost technical sense” in Roman
chronographic writing of this period: explicareis used by Catullus in his reference to
Nepos’s Chronica(1.6), and the verb “is a favourite word of Nepos in his extant work
and... is used by Cicero to describe the (evidently very similar) Liber Annalisof Atti-
cus”: Woodman 2003, 193, for both quotations, with references to earlier scholarship.
Jacoby regularly asserted that Timaeus pioneered the use of columns: e.g.,
Jacoby 1954, 1: 382; cf. Asheri 1991 – 92, 54. But this is highly unlikely in the light of
Eusebius’s proclamations of his novel layout, and so far as I can see Atticus is the only
possible predecessor of Eusebius in this regard: on Eusebius’s innovation in design, see
Mosshammer 1979, 37 and 62; Grafton and Williams (2006), chap. 3.
Burgess 2002, 8.
Mosshammer 1979, Burgess 1999, and Grafton and Williams (2006) are fun-
damental; see Burgess 2002 for an invaluable introduction to Jerome, and to the exem-
plary edition of Jerome ’s Chronicleby Helm (1956). Donalson 1996 provides a transla-
tion and commentary of Jerome ’s continuation from 327 – 378 c.e.
Adler 1989 is an excellent introduction to the whole subject, stressing how dis-
parate and unmonolithic the Christian chronographic tradition is; cf. Adler and Tuffin
2002, a translation of one of the most important post-Eusebian chronicles, that of
George Syncellus.
Zerubavel 2003, 105 – 9; on the Christians’ agenda, see Adler 1989, 18 – 20.
Herodotus 2.143, on which see Brown 1962; R. Thomas 2001, 208 – 10; Moyer
The most memorable expression of the Greek apprehension of their being “out-
past-ed” by the Egyptians is in Plato’s Timaeus(22a – 23a). The Christians are also tak-
ing over polemic of the kind one sees in Josephus’s Contra Apionem,in which the Jew-
ish author asserts that Hebrew and Eastern history is incomparably older than Greek.
Cf. Sacks 1990, 64, on the “particularist strife among Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks” in
first-century b.c.e.Alexandria, with the various groups arguing “for the chronological
primacy of their own founding legends and hence of their respective races.” On such
polemic between Christians and pagans in fourth-century c.e.Rome, see Ando 2001,
392–93.
Cobet 2000, 20. Augustine is a fascinating figure in the longer history of syn-
chronism, although he would take me too far from my competence and my pagans. In
The City of God(esp. 18.1 – 2), he shows a profound understanding of the mechanisms
and implications of synchronism. In these chapters he lays bare the comparative nature
of the whole enterprise, declaring that his purpose is to allow the city of God and the
notes to pages 27 – 32
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