city of men to be compared by his readers (ut ambae inter se possint consideratione
legentium comparari,18.1); he also reveals an understanding of the translatio imperii
theme that, as we shall see in the next chapter, underpins the developed form of the
pan-Mediterranean synchronistic project. He takes Assyria and Rome as the two great
representative Eastern and Western empires of mundane human history (18.2); here,
too, it is very striking that he understands how the Roman time line has been accom-
modated to the Greek time line, showing that Rome ’s status as the inheritor of Hel-
lenism is a contingent fact of human history.
- One thinks of how Velleius Paterculus inserts notices of literary efflorescence
into his history: 1.17; 2.36. - Ted Champlin makes the attractive suggestion to me that Lucilius comes last
as the Roman who invents a genre that is regarded as distinctively native and non-
Greek: cf. Quint. 10.1.93, satura... tota nostra est. - See above, pp. 25 – 28; cf. Hor. Epist.2.1.161 – 63 for the same Ciceronian insight.
- Zerubavel 2003, 87 – 88. Naturally, the arrival of Greek culture in Rome is by
no means straightforwardly a Good Thing: the mention of the first literature in Rome
is followed five years later (44) by the citation of the first divorce in Rome. - On Accius’s scholarship, especially the Didascalia,see E. Stärk in Suerbaum
2002, 163 – 65; and, for Gellius’s knowledge of Accius, Holford-Strevens 2003, s.v.
index, esp. 158 for NA3.3. - This famous embassy led by Carneades, the same one referred to in Cicero’s
correspondence with Atticus (above, pp. 14 – 15), forms a piece of ring composition,
with the figure of Carneades featuring at the beginning of Gellius’s essay (1). For the
later development of the configurations of Greek “culture” and Roman “power,”
remembered in this tradition as beginning with this embassy, see Whitmarsh 2001, esp.
chap. 4. - To allude to the title of the important paper of Wallace-Hadrill (1988).
- On translatio imperii,see, briefly, Momigliano 1987, 31 – 59; Cobet 2000, 15 –
18; further below, p. 55. It is a theme that J. M. Alonso-Núñez made distinctively his
own: see Clarke 1999b, 274, for a full bibliography. - Leuze (1911) saw this essential point in his still fundamental paper; see esp. 237
n. 2. - Similarly with Pompeius Trogus, who only introduces Rome into his univer-
sal history with Pyrrhus (book 23); cf. Wilcox 1987, 110. Modern histories mark this
moment accordingly; note Errington 1989, 83: “One side-effect of the defeat of Pyrrhus
was that it put Rome on the map for the Greek world. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was
sufficiently impressed to choose this time to send presents to the Senate and to form an
informal friendship; the Romans returned the diplomatic gesture.” Cf. Pearson 1987,
143, on the way that Western Greece does not become part of Hellenic history until the
Peloponnesian War, especially with the Athenian expedition to Sicily.
notes to pages 33 – 38. 229