language in praise of the book certainly stresses its utility and seems to do so in
terms of its physical appearance. Atticus asks him, “What did that book have that
could have been so new or so useful to you?” (sed quid tandem habuit liber iste quod
tibi aut nouum aut tanto usui posset esse? Brut.14). Cicero responds (15):
Ille uero et noua, inquam, mihi quidem multa et eam utilitatem quam
requirebam, ut explicatis ordinibus temporum uno in conspectu omnia
uiderem.
“It really had many things that were new to me,” I replied, “and it gave me
that usefulness that I was looking for, namely that, with the ranks of times
deployed, with one overview I could see everything.”The utility resides in the way you could see everything at once, as a result of the
fact that the “orders of the times” were “explicated” in one view (explicatis ordini-
bus temporum). My translation above (“with the ranks of times deployed”) brings
out one possible metaphor, a military one: instead of being in a single array, the
“times” have been “deployed out into lines or columns.”^103 Possibly, then, Atticus’s
book was arranged in parallel columns, with Greek events, organized around
Athenian archons, on one side, and Roman, organized around consuls, on the
other. It may have been this novel and useful physical layout that gripped Cicero,
as it made the act of synchronous comparison so easy and brought home to him the
disparate relationship in event and achievement between the two columns. One
can imagine Cicero scanning the book for information about literary culture: on
the Greek side, Archilochus — on the Roman side... a gap; on the Greek side,
Demosthenes — on the Roman side... And so on, all the way down to 240 b.c.e.,
where finally there is a literary entry for the Roman column, for the first time,
when a tragedy is staged in Rome, over 160 years after the deaths of Sophocles and
Euripides. This possibility is a lot to conjure from the trace of a metaphor, but it
would help explain the impact of the book on someone who already had a good
acquaintance with synchronistic scholarship, in the form of Nepos’s Chronica.
THE CHRISTIAN
SYNCHRONISTIC CHRONOGRAPHERS
If Atticus’s book did have an arrangement in columns, it was almost certainly the first
synchronistic work to do so.^104 But the book had little impact after Cicero, and the
- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome