Caesar\'s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

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the history of the concept of the “Axial Age,” see Arnason 2005, part of a collection of
essays devoted to the paradigm (my thanks to Peter Brown for this reference, and for
discussion of the issue).
28.FGrH566 F 150; see Asheri 1983, 87, for a charitable interpretation of this
moment as an attempt to register the “nuova èra che stava per inaugurasi nella storia
universale.”



  1. Diod. Sic. 13.108.4 – 5 = FGrH566 F 106.

  2. Vattuone 1991, 299.

  3. On the Athenian context, see esp. Momigliano 1977a; Vattuone 1991, 72 – 73.

  4. Momigliano 1977a, 39 – 41.
    33.Quam ait Timaeus Graecarum maxumam, omnium autem esse pulcherrimam,Cic.
    Rep.3.43 = FGrH566 F 40.
    34.FGrH115 F 153; trans. Connor 1968, 78 (my thanks to Michael Flower for this
    reference). On the Athenocentric representation of the Persian Wars both in antiquity
    and the modern world, inflating Salamis and downplaying the predominantly Spartan
    victory at Plataea, see Flower and Marincola 2002, 28 – 31.

  5. Cf. Lowenthal 1985, 53: “Remotenessis another quality that commends antiquity,
    the ‘so old’ of the American tourist for whose countrymen, a British observer com-
    ments, ‘it must be an embarrassment to possess a national history less than five centuries
    old.’ ” In the case of the Sicilians, the conventional colonial response, that the new soci-
    ety is more vigorous, is perhaps already present in Gelon’s jibe at the Greek ambassa-
    dors before Himera, that they have lost the spring of the year (7.162.1): “Gelo
    might... compare the youthful vigour of the colony, Sicily, to the spring, and the effete
    mother-country to the later duller months of the year” (How and Wells 1912, ad loc.).

  6. Pearson 1987, 143.

  7. Irad Malkin, oral remark reported by Griffiths 1998, n. 12, alluded to also in the
    case of Rome and Greece, above, p. 25.

  8. Pearson 1987, 57 – 59, on FGrH566 F 164.

  9. Cicero makes gentle fun of this tendency in Brut.63, reporting Timaeus’s
    strained attempts to represent Lysias as really Syracusan, not Athenian (FGrH566 F
    138; see Jacoby, Komm., 590, for Timaeus’s mission). Cicero exemplifies the pattern
    Timaeus objected to, representing Greek oratory as essentially coextensive with
    Athenian oratory (Brut. 26), and only mentioning the Sicilian aetiology with Corax
    and Tisias in the “technical” part of his account (46).
    40.FGrH566 F 119a; see Vattuone 1991, 92, 98.

  10. Another place where Timaeus tried to tie Western affairs into the Persian Wars
    was with his synchronism between the capture of Camarina in Sicily and what he calls
    “the crossing of Darius,” presumably the Marathon expedition of 490: Asheri 1991 –
    92, 73 – 75.
    42.FGrH566 F 94.


notes to pages 48 – 50. 233

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