way to another.”^44 Its pretensions to this status continue to be overlooked in mod-
ern scholarship,^45 but there are traces in the ancient historiographical tradition that
enable us to see Syracuse as a contender for imperial status, in addition to being the
place that destroyed Athens’ claims.^46
In this story, Syracuse, Athens, and Carthage are linked together as the Big
Three of their day.^47 Plutarch says that many Athenians saw their attack on Syra-
cuse in 415 b.c.e.as a preliminary for an attack on Carthage, so as to establish total
hegemony over the Mediterranean.^48 This vision is discernible in Diodorus Siculus
as well. When he describes the catastrophe of the Carthaginians at Himera in 480
b.c.e., with the reaction at Carthage (11.23), he models the whole sequence sys-
tematically on Thucydides’ description of the catastrophe of the Athenian ex-
pedition against Syracuse; in this way he creates a pattern whereby the Syracusans
do to the Carthaginians what they were later going to do to the Athenians, and
what the Athenians planned to do to Carthage. The interwined destinies of the
three great maritime cities are also brought into view by Livy and Plutarch, when
they narrate the capture of Syracuse by Marcellus in 212 b.c.e.^49 They both de-
scribe the tears of the Roman commander as he looks at the conquered city, with
Livy telling us that he was reflecting on Syracuse ’s destruction of the Athenian
expedition and on its victories against Carthage; Plutarch adds the telling detail,
to establish a parallelism with Carthage, that the amount of booty taken from
Syracuse was no less than the amount taken from Carthage when it was sacked.
Syracuse is a link in a chain of imperial destiny that connects Athens and Carthage.
And Rome.
ROME, CARTHAGE, AND
THE SICILIAN PARADIGM
As the tears of Marcellus at Syracuse show, when the Romans are trying to chart
their position on the map of Mediterranean time with its sequence of imperial suc-
cession, they do so in the first instance as the inheritors of the Sicilian tradition we
have been investigating.^50 Before the Romans, it was the Syracusans who were the
people in the middle, facing West and East, the only state successfully to fight both
the barbarian Carthaginians and the Greeks of the mainland. It is not simply that
the Romans scrabble around for significant coincidences and parallelisms in order
to ratchet themselves up to become equals in Mediterranean power and inheritors
in the succession of empires theme: it is crucial to recognize that they are using a
preexisting West Greek paradigm in order to do so. Hanell was therefore right to
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East