and no joint purpose in the fact that the Greeks in Sicily happened to be defeating
Carthaginians at the very same time that their cousins in mainland Greece were
defeating Persians. Just as he does not approve of coincidence in tragic or epic
plots, so he does not attach significance to coincidence in history. Most people in
the ancient world were not so robust, and even now we can fnd ourselves mind-
lessly impressed by the striking chronological coincidences with which history is
littered.^4 Many people ’s favorite extraordinary historical coincidence would be the
simultaneous death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who both died on 4 July
1826, fifty years to the day after signing the Declaration of Independence together
in Philadelphia.^5 It would have been striking enough if they had died on the same
day; the fact that it was 4 July is somehow more astounding, and the fact that it was
the fiftieth 4 July makes it seem prodigious. The patterning would have been
absolutely perfect if they had been the last two signers alive, but unfortunately
Charles Carroll, the last signer to die, was still lingering on in Maryland and would
survive for another six years.^6
Our minds seem to be so structured that we seek pattern, and this is much eas-
ier to do if you are bad at statistical probability and do not understand the issues of
coincidence. Most of us nowadays are still hopelessly bad at statistical probability
(and I include myself ); we continue to be amazed by striking coincidences, even
when they are statistically likely.^7 In the ancient world, every single person was
hopelessly bad at statistical probability, because they were born before that
moment in the mid-seventeenth century when probability came into being. And so
it took an Aristotle to refuse to be impressed by the accident that Himera and
Salamis happened at the same time, while others continued to comment on it,
together with the other striking coincidences that were perceived, or constructed,
around the Persian Wars — the sea battle of Artemisium and the land battle of
Thermopylae happening on the same day, or the simultaneous battles of Plataea
and Mycale.^8
SICILY AND MAINLAND GREECE:
THE “COMMON CAUSE”?
Aristotle ’s selection of Himera and Salamis out of all the other possible coinci-
dences of history turns out to be a happy coincidence for me, since the first part of
this chapter will focus on Sicily and Athens. The historian Ephorus, a contempo-
rary of Aristotle, felt that he could meaningfully link the affairs of Athens and
Sicily and give some purposive significance to the synchronism by saying that in
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East