- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome
of the consuls of the year.^72 The best way to get some idea of what the Chronicamay
have looked like is perhaps to read the first book of Velleius Paterculus.^73 Here one
finds extensive use of all the paraphernalia of chronological scholarship: interval
counting (“in the eightieth year after the capture of Troy,” 1.2.1); positioning of
important literary figures (Homer, 1.5; Hesiod, 1.7.1); the memorable digression on
the clustering of talent at circumscribed periods (1.16 – 17); significant synchro-
nisms (Carthage and the Macedonian monarchy founded at the same time, 1.6.4 –
5); counting back from the time of writing (1.8.1; 1.8.4; 1.12.5); dating by
Olympiads (1.8.4).
The correlation of Greek and Roman years that Nepos is constructing is much
harder to achieve than it looks, not least because the basic unit of the year is a vari-
able one.^74 A Roman consular year looks as if it is a secure unit, running, like our
year, from the beginning of January to the end of December, but in fact the con-
suls had only regularly taken up office on 1 January from 153 b.c.e.;^75 between that
date and 222 b.c.e.they had taken up office on March 15, and before 222 the con-
suls took up and left office at any point in the seasonal year, depending on cam-
paigning exigencies.^76 The consular year, then, is a fuzzy chronological unit, not
corresponding necessarily with the civil calendrical year. Further, if Nepos is
counting from the foundation of the city, he is strictly counting from 21 April, the
anniversary of Romulus’s founding of Rome on the feast of the Parilia, not from
January, or March. When he turns to correlate any of these years with a Greek
year, he is faced with problems that will now be familiar to the reader, for the years
of the various Greek states did not overlap, beginning now in summer, for exam-
ple, as in Athens, or in autumn, as in Macedonia or Achaea. The only Panhellenic
chronological unit available to scholars or historians was the Olympian year, but
this ran from midsummer to midsummer, bisecting the campaigning season
together with the corresponding Roman consular year.^77 How aware Nepos was of
the problems, and how successfully he solved them, we cannot now ascertain.
One can develop a sense of the problems facing ancient chronographers and
historians by imagining how a modern Nepos might express a date if we lived in a
counterfactual world without an internationally agreed calendar and numerical
dating system. The D-day invasion would no longer be dated to 6 June 1944. First
of all, the event would be marked as coming after an interval of so many years
from an earlier important event, as part of the interval-spacing mechanism — let us
say, thirty years after the outbreak of the previous war. The actual day would have
a different notation in the different calendars of Britain, Germany, and the United