in Scipio’s or Polybius’s mind in 146 b.c.e.: Mendels 1981; Alonso-Núñez 1983;
Momigliano 1987, 40 – 42; Suerbaum 2002, 428. The question is sharpened by debate
over whether the topos in classical historiography goes back to a pre-Greek Eastern
template, introduced via Hebrew apocalyptic or anti-Roman propaganda: Flusser
1972; Collins 1998, 92 – 98 (a reference I owe to Dan Sobaer); Cobet 2000, 15 – 16; oth-
erwise, it is argued that the imperial succession theme we see in Daniel is one that is
taken in the reverse direction, from the Greek world: Momigliano 1987, 48 – 52; Millar
1997, 103 – 4. Given that Polybius had, as we have seen, a vision of Rome following on
from Macedonia and Persia as a world power, and since he could have read in his
Herodotus that Persia was the inheritor of imperial power from the Medes, who had
taken over from Assyria (1.95, 130), then he does at least have a potential framework of
Assyria-Media-Persia-Macedonia-Rome, and the possibility remains that Appian pre-
serves a good trace of Polybius’s vision, even if he has codified it systematically in a
way that Polybius perhaps did not do. Such is basically the position of Trompf 1979,
79 – 81; Momigliano 1987, 40 – 42; cf. Dench 2005, 58 – 59, 88 – 89.
Hanell 1956, 155; Momigliano 1977a, 54, 58; Vattuone 1991, 301; cf. Asheri
1991 – 92, 72 – 73: “The discovery of Rome as the new political and military counter-
part of Carthage, replacing the declining Graeculi of post-Agathoclean Sicily and of
the semi-barbarized Magna Graecia, and inheriting their traditional position in the net-
work of political and commercial relations in the western Mediterranean, was the great
contribution of Timaeus to early Hellenistic historiography.”
Dench 1995, 69 – 70. On the late development of any consciousness of “Hel-
lenicity” among the Greeks in Sicily in particular, see J. Hall 2004. See now Dench
2005 for a reexamination of the whole issue of self-definition against barbarism on the
part of both Greeks and Romans.
See Walbank 1957 – 79, 1:42, on the Greek historians of the Hannibalic War,
“who wrote mainly from the Punic point of view.”
See Roussel 1970 for an argument that the Sicilian Greeks at the time of the
First Punic War were if anything more inclined to be pro-Carthaginian than pro-
Roman.
Harrell (1998) provides an excellent account of Herodotus’s nuanced represen-
tation of the Greek/non-Greek situation in Sicily. She shows how the Deinomenid
rulers of Syracuse could play up their “Eastern” origins, and it would be worthwhile
to follow in her footsteps and see how much the “Trojan” Romans learned from Pin-
dar, Bacchylides, and their Sicilian patrons about how to project themselves “as
colonists of eastern heritage whose families achieve rule in the colonial land where they
have settled” (221).
See Dench 2003, 300, for Daunian Arpi casting the Romans as Greeks and the
Samnites as barbarians; and 302 – 3, for Romans and Samnites competing over the role
of Greeks (cf. Dench 1995, 54).
notes to page 56