Aulus Gellius’s Synchronistic Chapter. 35
from Cicero, who seems to have come to this recognition, never quite appre-
hended by him in this way before, via his perusal of Atticus’s Liber Annalisin the
winter of 47/6 b.c.e.^113 All the way through, Gellius subtly highlights a consistent
disparity between the early entries on the Greek literary and cultural side and the
gap on the Roman side. Early on (10), he tells us that at the time when Aeschylus
was flourishing, the Romans were instituting the offices of tribune and aedile.
When Empedocles was eminent in natural philosophy, the Romans were drawing
up the Twelve Tables (15). The Greek period that boasted Sophocles, Euripides,
Hippocrates, Democritus, and Socrates, has as a counterpart in Rome the good old
Roman story of a father mercilessly executing his son for disobeying military
orders (17 – 18). The synchronism of the philosophers Epicurus and Zeno with the
stern censorship of Fabricius and Aemilius Papus (38 – 39) clearly plays to a tradi-
tional Roman pattern, whereby the Greeks rely on philosophers to tell them how
to behave, while the Romans have authoritative father-figures who enforce the mos
Figure4.
Jerome ’s Chroniclefor the years 27 – 24 b.c.e., showing two time columns.
Helm 1956, 164.