Aulus Gellius’s Synchronistic Chapter. 33
but who could have had no conception that his world would be turned upside
down by these people within five generations. I now turn finally to him, to pick out
briefly some of the most important ways in which the synchronistic mentality
could work for the pagans. Gellius’s essay is sometimes derided as an inconse-
quential magpie jumble of disparate synchronisms, but he knows his traditions,
and his collection shows a series of valuable intuitions about what is at stake in this
apparently mechanical exercise.
At the very beginning of the essay, Gellius says that his subject is “the times
when those Greeks and Romans flourished who were famous and conspicuous
either for talent or for political power(uel ingenio uel imperio nobiles insignesque),
between the founding of Rome and the Second Punic War” (NA17.21.1).^111 We are
reminded that the programme of Apollodorus and his followers included what we
would call literary and intellectual history as well as political and military. It is this
larger cultural dimension of the synchronism project that provides the main expla-
nation for why Gellius stops where he does. He says he will stop with the Second