marked this lesson: see Meister 1989 – 90, 63, for the way Timaeus uses natural (i.e.,
Panhellenically comprehensible) calendrical markers such as harvest time or the
decline of the Pleiades.
- Gomme 1945, 5.
- An insistent theme in Jacoby’s writings: see Jacoby 1949, 200 – 25; cf. Purcell
2003, 20. Davidson (2005, 13) acutely observes that Thucydides uses unlocalized time
frames as part of the general strategy, already set in train by Herodotus, of creating a
form that “had no local structure... , no local occasion... and no local space”; as he
puts it, in Greece history “is structurally supra-local, belonging to the pan-Greek
‘middle.’ ” - As argued by, for example, Asheri (1991 – 92, 54); see, rather, Dunn 1998a, esp.
224, on the common modern error of assuming that the ancients have utility in mind in
their time arrangements. On the use of natural markers, not synchronization of calen-
dars, to fix the Panhellenic Olympic festival (at the second full moon after the summer
solstice), see the decisive arguments of Miller (1975); Statius appears to refer to this
kind of arrangement with his fine phrase about the celebration of the Nemean Games
in honor of Archemorus: maestaque perpetuis sollemnia iungimus astris(“We join the sad
solemnities to the perpetual stars,” Theb.7.99). - Walbank 1957 – 79, 2:348.
- Polyb. 12.11.1 = FGrH566 T 10.
- On Timaeus’s chronological work, see, conveniently, Walbank 1957 – 79,
2:347 – 48; for his pivotal importance in the Greek historiographical tradition, Jacoby
1954, 1: 382. - On Eratosthenes’ Chronographiae,see Pfeiffer 1968, 163 – 64; Fraser 1970, 198 –
200; 1972, 1:456 – 57; on Apollodorus’s Chronica,see Jacoby 1902; Pfeiffer 1968, 255 –
57; in general, Jacoby, FGrH239 – 61 (Zeittafeln), Komm., 661 – 65; Mosshammer 1979,
esp. 97 – 100. - Indeed, according to Grafton and Swerdlow (1986), Eratosthenes even gave a
calendrical date for the sack of Troy, the seventh or eighth day before the end of the
month Thargelion, a date that Virgil, according to them, alludes to in Aen.2.255, taci-
tae per amica silentia lunae. - As we have seen, Timaeus synchronized Argive priestesses, Spartan ephors,
and Athenian archons with Olympic victors, and he certainly gave dates counted back
from a “first Olympiad” (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom.1.74.1 = Timaeus FGrH566 F 60): the
vexed question then arises of whether he had already fixed on the “776/5” date before
Eratosthenes. Jacoby is convinced that Timaeus devised the “776/5” benchmark for
the first Olympic Games and was followed in this by Eratosthenes: Timaeus FGrH566,
Komm., 538, Noten, 321; Eratosthenes FGrH241, Komm., 662 – 63. We return to this
problem in chapter 3: see p. 84 below. - Geus (2002) is highly skeptical about whether the work was designed to estab-
notes to pages 18 – 19. 223