of the Roman world are being redefined, and he works into this apprehension the
idea that his own world is having its limits redefined as well. In line 2 Catullus im-
plicitly reinforces Pompey’s message that Asia is no longer the edge of the Roman
world; the extremi,the men on the outside limit, are now the Indians, beside
Ocean, where Alexander the Great dreamed of going, and never did. Other unin-
corporated peoples who now mark the new borders follow in the second stanza,
before he turns to Caesar, the Western Alexander, who has wickedly filched the
epithet magnusfrom his son-in-law (10) — not Pompey the Great but Caesar the
Great.^108 In Catullus, Caesar deserves the epithet more than Pompey, because he
has actually crossed Ocean, to encounter the ghastly Britons, on the Western edge
of the world (11 – 12).^109 The Alps used to be the boundary of that part of the
Roman world — now the limit is the natural boundary of Ocean, and the Rhine,
which is now the limit of the Roman province of Gallia, Gallicum Rhenum(11). In
crossing the Alps, Catullus and his companions will see the monuments of Caesar
the Great (10); these are another attribute of Pompey’s appropriated by Caesar, for
they are territory-enhancing markers of the novel kind that Pompey erected to
stake out his enlargement of the imperium.^110
These colossal achievements in West and East provide the context for the new
wave of universal histories, which we shall consider shortly. But it is Pompey’s
expansion of the imperiumin the East that provides the focus for a crucial innova-
tion in the charting of Roman and Greek time, as we see the timescales of the Asian
monarchies brought into synchronous harmony with the timescales of Hellenism
for the first time. The Greeks had been aware ever since Hecataeus of how the
Asian timescales dwarfed their own, definitively “out-past-ing” them, to use
Zerubavel’s phrase; but for the most part they had defensively or neurotically or
chauvinistically managed somehow to keep this knowledge offto the side of their
consciousness.^111 In this period, however, we see the appearance of the chronolog-
ical work of Castor of Rhodes, a figure for whom we have no solid biographical
information. His Chronicafor the first time incorporates the Eastern King lists into
the synchronistic Greek schemes, and even mentions the figure of Moses.^112 He
started with Ninus of Assyria, in “2123/2122 b.c.e.,” and managed to link him to
a Greek contemporary, King Aegialeus of Sicyon, the oldest Greek king he could
come up with.^113 Part of his motivation, no doubt, was to ennoble Greek civiliza-
tion by tracing it back even beyond the Trojan War, to show that it was no less
venerable than the Assyrians, whom he took as his beginning point; by a kind of
jujitsu flip, this attempt to give the Greek past more depth brought the Greeks
crashing down when the chronographic tradition was eventually co-opted by the
Incorporating Asia. 63