- My word “invasion” is itself, of course, anachronistically Romanocentric in its
focalization. - Their obliteration, at least, might have registered: Cornell 1989, 302: “The
Sack... was the first event of Roman history to impress itself on the consciousness of
the Greeks.” - In general, Morello 2002, esp. 71 – 72, on Livy’s linking of the two Alexanders.
Tony Woodman refers me to Walsh 1961, 201 – 3, for Livy’s fondness for small-scale
counterfactuals (“TheRomans would have been defeated if not for the arrival of
another group”), and to Moles 1984, 242, for a list of places where Velleius toys “with
the ‘ifs of history’ (46.3, 47.5, 48.2, 72.2, 86.1).” - Above, p. 21
- Leuze 1911, 247 – 48. See Pearson 1987, 157, for speculation that this year was
an important synchronism between Athenian and Sicilian constitutional history in
Timaeus. Velleius is careful to mark the various changes in Athens’ constitution, with
the end of the monarchy (1.2.1), and the end of the life archonship (1.8.3); the lost por-
tion of book 1 would no doubt have registered the annual archonship and the thirty
tyrants. - From Xerxes’ invasion, for example, he mentions Salamis and not Plataea
(12); cf. below, p. 41. - Another extremely valuable way into this comparison mentality is via Hors-
fall 1993, which shows how the Roman writers of Augustus’s time were insistently
comparing themselves to their Greek predecessors and counterparts, and noting how
far they still had to go to catch up. - Lamberton 1997, 155, 158; cf. RE2R 21.936 – 37; Desideri 1992, esp. 4475 – 78;
Duff1999, 287 – 309; Pelling 2002, 349 – 63, esp. 359 – 61. - I realize that this is perhaps not a good metaphor to use in a land where the
automatic transmission reigns supreme, but my father taught me to drive on the beach
in New Zealand in a 1955 Austin Gypsy, a variety of jeep, in which you had to double-
declutch between each gear change as you went up or down the gears.
chapter2.SYNCHRONIZING TIMES II:
WEST AND EAST, SICILY AND THE ORIENT
Translation by M. Hubbard in Russell and Winterbottom 1972.
It is worth pausing to remind ourselves of how much more difficult it was for the
Greeks and Romans to establish that events in different parts of the world, with their
different calendars, happened on “the same day”: Brown 1958, 74; Pearson 1987, 157.
How did one set about claiming that a day on the calendar of Syracuse was the same as
a day on the calendar of Athens? To correlate particular events, counting back was
standard: see Hdt. 9.101.2, linking Mycale and Plataea; Caes. BCiv.3.105.3 – 6, linking
the battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly with an omen in Ephesus. See Miller 1975 for the
notes to pages 38 – 43