Aristotle ’s objection that the events of history are not “directed to achieve any
identical purpose.”^89
Such synchronistic views of the interrelated nature of the new Mediterranean
order are not just the apparatus of scholarship, if Purcell (1995) is right, as I believe
he is, to argue that the Romans deliberately engineered the simultaneous destruc-
tion of Corinth and Carthage in 146 b.c.e.as a spectacular demonstration of the
reach of their power into the two halves of the world. The “two domains” of the
“Greek conceptual division of the Mediterranean” had always resisted integration
until now, but from this point on events in both domains would be linked by an
unprecedented power.^90 A new unity of time and place is emerging, in dialogue
with a developing sense of integration in the Hellenistic world itself. A Greek pre-
disposition to conceive of the oecumenein integrated terms is forced to redefine
itself in order to accommodate the new power of Rome.^91
INCORPORATING ASIA
There is still one major episode in our story, the last significant act in the synchro-
nistic project before the advent of Christianity. The “West” and “East” of this
chapter’s title have been referring so far to the western and eastern halves of the
Greek Mediterranean. The more normal reference of West and East would be to
Europe and Asia, and we need now to mark the incorporation of the Asian
chronologies into the Mediterranean ones, along with the full incorporation into
the Roman imperiumof the seaboard and hinterland of the Eastern Mediterranean.
For it is plain that despite Polybius’s talk of Asia in his initial programmatic syn-
chronism (1.3.2), he is aspiring to a universalism that does not correspond to real-
ities on the ground in the second century b.c.e.^92 This universalism did not come
until the conquests of Pompey the Great. It was not until the late 60s b.c.e.that the
Roman imperiumcould lay claim to a genuinely pan-Mediterranean reach; it is only
then that we see the appearance of the first synchronistic work that integrates the
time charts of Asia with the time charts of Greece and Rome, and only then that
we see the emergence of the first genuinely universal histories.^93 The new realities
of the Eastern Mediterranean elicited new constructions of time, which were not
only broader in their synchronic range but deeper in their diachronic reach.^94
It is all to0 easy to overlook the impact of Pompey’s achievements in the 60s
b.c.e., especially with his Eastern command.^95 As Millar reminds us, “in the early
first century B.C., after all, Rome directly ruled (i.e., raised taxes from) no more
than Italy itself, with Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; part of Spain and the route to it
Incorporating Asia. 59