ary history to the experience of reading the Liber Annalisof his friend Atticus. It is
by no means the case that his great dialogues before this date, De Oratore(55 b.c.e.)
and De Republica(51 b.c.e.), are ill informed or unlearned — on the contrary, they
reveal a remarkable level of scholarly knowledge about Greek and Roman history,
embedded in a secure chronological framework.^93 Nor should we attribute all the
changes we discern in the later dialogues, especially Brutus(46 b.c.e.), to the
impact of reading one book; Cicero had been reading continuously in the inter-
vening years, and even after reading Atticus’s Liber Annalishe did not rely solely
upon it for all chronological information.^94 Nonetheless, a new intellectual excite-
ment about the issues of chronology reveals itself in the Brutus;^95 in particular,
there is a new perspective on the question of how to synchronize the historical
developments of Greek and Roman culture, and this new perspective is one that it
makes sense to see coming from the experience of reading Atticus’s book, as
Cicero tells us it did.^96
In the masterpieces of the 50s, Cicero’s use of transcultural parallels between
Greece and Rome is very different from what we see later in the Brutus.Cicero’s
main interest is in “likeness” across the cultures, rather than disjunction. In the ear-
lier works there is a constant seeking of parallels between the cultural development
of Greece and Rome, together with a use of chronological analogy that seems
practically unhistorical in comparison with what we shall see in the Brutus.^97 One
of the most striking cases in the De Republicacan be seen in his discussion of the
apotheosis of Romulus (2.18 – 19). Here the speaker, Scipio, argues that we should
believe in the apotheosis as a fact, not a fable, since Romulus did not live in a rude
age, but less than six hundred years earlier, at a time of letters, “when Greece was
already full of poets and musicians, and there was less belief in fables unless they
were about old events” (cum iam plena Graecia poetarum et musicorum esset
minorque fabulis nisi de ueteribus rebus haberetur fides). As Zetzel puts it, “the argu-
ment is that even the earliest period of Roman history was contemporary with (and
therefore took part in) a high level of culture in Greece.”^98
In the Brutus,a different sensibility is in view, one that is far more interested in
the “unlikeness” that is generated by the act of comparing the chronologies of the
two cultures. Looking at Atticus’s synchronisms opened Cicero’s eyes, it appears,
and at the beginning of the Brutushe praises and acknowledges his friend ’s accom-
plishment (13 – 16). The comparison of the time schemes seems to have brought
home in detail just how different the two societies were in their intellectual and lit-
erary development. In particular, Cicero is now very struck by the fact that Greece
has a literature from the beginning, whereas Rome only develops one late, a mere
- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome