- Synchronizing Times II: West and East
Christians, for they could claim that the Greeks were mere Johnny-come-latelies
in comparison with the Jews, whom the Christians were able to annex as their
predecessors in God ’s story, taking the range of chronography back to the very
moment of creation.^114
It was not by accident that Castor was described as Filorwvmaio", “Roman-
lover.”^115 He was intent on linking up important Greek and Roman events in the
way with which we are now familiar. He chose a crucial epochal year, for exam-
ple, for the end of his first book — 754 b.c.e.This was the year in which the life
archonship at Athens was ended, the unlimited powers of the kings at Sparta were
curtailed, and the year before the foundation of Rome — the event, presumably,
with which his second book began.^116 Far more telling than his opening, however,
is his ending, for he carried his chronology down all the way to the year 61 b.c.e.,
the year of Pompey’s triumph after his Eastern conquests.^117 From the perspective
of Castor, who is systematically harmonizing Eastern and Greek and Roman time
frames for the first time, the triumph of Pompey is the ideal end point, since only
now has the Eastern world finally been made part of the Roman power and
brought into order by Pompey.^118 Pompey’s settlement at last incorporates the
realms of Mithridates and the Seleucids, and the settlement of the Eastern Mediter-
ranean as a whole brings to an end that confusion and bewilderment that had been
engendered up till now by Rome ’s refusal to behave like a proper hegemon.^119
Castor’s Chronicahad a substantial impact at Rome in the following generations,
on Varro’s chronological researches, for example, and even on such amateurs of
history as Horace.^120 It is in the years immediately after Castor’s work appeared
that we find the first Roman works of synchronistic scholarship, with Nepos’s
Chronicasometime in the early or mid-50s, and Atticus’s Liber Annalisin 47/6
b.c.e.It is likely, however, that the impulse for these first Roman works of syn-
chronism did not come from Castor directly, for they appear not to synchronize
West and East, but Rome and Greece, just as we see Varro and Nepos doing with
their pairs of Greek and Roman lives. Rather, we should conceive of these first
Roman scholars of synchronism responding to the same universalizing atmosphere
as Castor, and providing for their readers a guide to the development of the past
events that had led in their lifetimes to an unprecedented involvement of times and
places. If these developments had taken place under Augustus, we could all spin the
usual tales about the centralization of the imperiumand the creation of a single gaze
under the unifying figure of the emperor, and the case we are discussing is a use-
ful caution against reading the age of Augustus in too teleological a way: it looks