For the year 338 b.c.e., for example, they engineered a significant synchronism
between the battle of Chaeronea in mainlaind Greece and the battle between the
Tarentines and Lucanians in southern Italy — these battles took place, it was
alleged, not just on the same day but at the same hour.^16 The crucial importance of
these West/East synchronisms comes through very clearly in Polybius’s initial
plotting of the time charts at the beginning of his history (1.6.1 – 2). Here he secures
his ultimate starting point of “387/6 b.c.e.” by means of key events as benchmarks
at intervals of nineteen years earlier and sixteen years after. These benchmark
events, the battles of Aegospotami and Leuctra, are as epoch-making in his audi-
ence ’s mind as the French Revolution for us, and about as far back in time. He goes
on to itemize crucial events occurring in his epochal year, events that link together
in sequence (i) the realms of Sparta and Asia, with the peace of Antalcidas, (ii) the
realms of Sicily and southern Italy, with the siege of Rhegium by Dionysius of
Syracuse, and (iii) central Italy, with the Gauls’ capture of Rome.^17 In our analysis
of Gellius’s synchronistic chapter we noted the important theme of the two
Alexanders simultaneously moving out from mainland Greece in opposite direc-
tions, to invade Asia and Italy; we can now put this into a wider context and see the
synchronism of the two Alexanders as part of a long-standing Greek urge for com-
parison and contrast between West and East, grounded in what Purcell refers to as
“the Greek conceptual division of the Mediterranean into two domains.”^18
PUTTING SICILY ON THE GREEK TIME
CHART: TIMAEUS OF TAUROMENIUM
Sicily dominates the western Greek discourse of rivalry with the mainland, and the
single most important representative of this discourse is Sicily’s greatest historian,
Timaeus of Tauromenium, whom we have already briefly met in the survey of
Greek synchronism in chapter 1. He is a figure of crucial significance for the theme
of synchronism, and for the history of charting time in the Mediterranean, not least
because he was the first Greek historian to pay sustained and thoughtful attention
to the new power of Rome.^19 The author of a technical work of synchronistic
chronology as well as of a history of Sicily, he spent fifty years working in Athens
and died aged over ninety shortly after the outbreak of the first war between Rome
and Carthage in 264 b.c.e.^20 His “Sicilian History” was really a history of the west-
ern Mediterranean, going from the earliest times down to his own day, and it
remained the fundamental historical work on the western Mediterranean for cen-
turies.^21 A major part of his project was to boost Sicily and the West so as to make
Putting Sicily on the Greek Time Chart. 47