Greeks, at the very end of his very long life, as he saw the Romans moving out of
the peninsula and crossing over into his homeland of Sicily for the first time.
Timaeus himself may have seen the Romans as stepping into the Syracusan part of
the anti-barbarian paradigm, a paradigm originally constructed on the basis of a
synchronistic analogy with mainland Hellas.^69
We need to remind ourselves that it was not in the least inevitable that the
Romans should configure their relationship with the Greeks in this way, as part-
ners, and successors, in a battle of civilization against barbarism. In many ways, as
we have seen, they could be represented as having more in common with the
Carthaginians than with the Greeks. Our monolithic polarities between Greek and
barbarian eclipse the complexity of the issues for contemporaries.^70 The main
Greek historian of the First Punic War, after all, was a pro-Carthaginian Sicilian,
Philinus of Acragas, and another Sicilian Greek historian, Silenus, accompanied
Hannibal in the next war and wrote of his campaigns against the Romans.^71 There
were many pro-Carthaginian Greek cities in Sicily at various times, and the whole
Greek-versus-barbarian paradigm is far less monolithic in Sicily than Pindar and
Timaeus and modern constructions of the “Other” would have us believe: Greeks
and Phoenicians coexisted for the most part peacefully in Sicily for centuries.^72 For
most readers it is quite a surprise to learn from Herodotus that Hamilcar, defeated
by Gelon at Himera in 480, was the son of a Carthaginian man and a Syracusan
woman (7.166).^73 In other words, the Sicilian Greek tradition allowed for a pro-
barbarian as well as an anti-barbarian stance, and it was a clear statement of a par-
ticular kind of Hellenism when the Romans opted for the latter rather than the for-
mer — when they opted not to be represented as barbarians, in this particular
paradigm, but as Greeks of a certain kind. The Romans will already have been
practiced in playing such roles, or acceding to the attempts of others to cast them
in such roles. From the time of the Roman conquest of central and southern Italy
there is evidence for Greek communities casting the Romans in the role of victo-
rious “Greeks” against vanquished Samnite “barbarians,” and for competition
between Romans and Samnites over who was going to get to play the part of
“Greek victor.”^74
Naevius, in his poem on the First Punic War, may be our first just tangible evi-
dence for the way that the Romans in Sicily insinuated themselves into the
Syracusan half of the civilization/barbarian paradigm.^75 One of the most powerful
Greek icons of anti-barbarian struggle was the Gigantomachy, in which the gods
asserted order against chaos in mythical time, as their Greek counterparts in
human time imposed order on the barbarian threat, whether it be Persian, Celt, or
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East