moment of closure, but we can see from Pompeius Trogus that the job kept hav-
ing to be revisited, and he makes it clear that the Parthians in fact remained uncon-
quered.^128 The mirage of definitive victory over the desert dwellers of Meso-
potamia kept tantalizing the Western imperialists, deluding successive generations
into thinking that they had managed to effect a final closure.
Here we confront the whole problem of an ending in time, of how you can
impose a definitive closural shape on the unstoppable and indivisible onward flow
of time.^129 Triumphal moments are particularly alluring in their deceptively defini-
tive appeal. Ennius planned the first edition of his Annalesto conclude with the tri-
umph of Fulvius Nobilior in 187 b.c.e.;^130 but he found himself adding another
three books.^131 Polybius began his project in the belief that the battle of Pydna and
the destruction of the kingdom of Macedonia in 168/7 b.c.e.was a definitive end
point, the moment at which Rome took over its role as the latest imperial power;^132
the refusal of events to stand still drew him on to 146 b.c.e., with the destructions
of Carthage and Corinth.^133 If a writer evades the issue of closure by simply writ-
ing down to his own time, like Livy, then he faces the Tristram Shandy problem,
whereby the more you live, the more you have to write.^134
A universal history written under the Roman Empire is one that may aspire to
cover all of space as well as all of time. In keeping with our theme of continuity in
this area between the late Republic and early Principate, it is debated whether
thefirst author of a truly universal geography of the whole (Roman) world is
Cornelius Nepos in the 50s b.c.e.or Strabo in the 20s.^135 Once again, however, the
unification of the world under the single undisputed political leadership of one
man provides a new momentum to a drive that was already under way.^136 The
places as well as the times of the Mediterranean are now bound up in each other,
through Rome, and the resulting sense of geographical cohesion is caught in the
map of Agrippa just as the sense of temporal cohesion is caught in the synchronis-
tic chronographies and the universal histories.^137
These newly refined grids of time and space worked to create an imperial sense
of identity, enabling the inhabitants of the Empire to develop a lateral sense of
localization in a shared time and a shared space; in chapter 6 we shall investigate
the role that the Roman calendar likewise had to play in this function. Whatever
this imperial sense of identity may have been for different people in different times
and places, it was not a modern nationalism. Nonetheless, Anderson’s account of
modern nationalism is strikingly suggestive in its evocation of how important to
nationalism is this sense of simultaneity in a shared time and participation in a par-
allel space: “For this sense of parallelism or simultaneity not merely to arise, but
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East