- For play on this epithet, see Feeney 1986. In the Pliny passage just quoted, he
makes a similar joke, noting that Caesar was maiorthan Magnus,“bigger” than “Mr.
Big” (HN7.99). There are traces of provincial attempts to transfer the name from the
old Roman Alexander, Pompey, to the new one, Caesar: see Reynolds 1982, 159 – 60,
for a triumviral-period inscription from Aphrodisias that refers to Julius Caesar as oJ
mevga"(my thanks to Tony Woodman for the reference). - On the numinous aura of the Britons and of the boundary of Ocean, see
Braund 1996, chap. 1, “The Conquest of Ocean”: he refers, tellingly, to Nicolaus of
Damascus’s Life of Augustus95 for the claim “that Caesar was preparing a Parthian
campaign at the time of his death in 44 b.c.in order to reach the Ocean in the east as
he had reached it in the west” (20). - Gruen 1984, 285; Clarke 1999a, 307 – 8.
- Above, p. 29.
112.FGrH250 F 14 for Moses. - Cf. Bickerman 1952, 73, on how late it was for the Greeks to accept the antiq-
uity of the Eastern figures: “At last, in Caesar’s time, Castor harmonized the Greek and
Oriental chronologies.” Castor’s was the breakthrough, despite the fact that there had
long been available the histories of Egypt and Babylon written in Greek by Manetho
and Berossus: on the scant attention paid by Greeks to these histories, written by “local
savants,” see Kuhrt 1987, 33; Dillery (forthcoming), in an interesting discussion of the
audiences for Manetho and Berossus, makes the lack of attention from mainstream
Greeks less surprising. - Adler 1989, 17.
115.FGrH250 T 1 (Suidas). - Mosshammer 1979, 135; cf. Vell. Pat. 1.6.1, linking the epochs of the founda-
tion of Rome and the end of life-archonships at Athens.
117.FGrH250 F 5. Pompey celebrated his triumph on his birthday (Pliny HN
37.13); we return to the significance of this in chapter 5. - Jacoby, FGrH250, Komm., 815. Kallet-Marx’s important modern history of
Rome ’s integration of the Eastern Mediterranean chooses the same terminus (Kallet-
Marx 1995, 7). - Gruen 1984, 356.
- See Jacoby, FGrH250, Komm., 815, for his impact on Varro’s De Gente Populi
Romani(43 b.c.e.); invaluable discussion of Castor’s impact on Varro and thence on
Ovid ’s Metamorphosesin Cole 2004; in general, Mazzarino 1966, 2.2:448 – 49: “L’età
pompeiano-cesariana, cioè l’età di Castore, ha avuto così un’enorme importanza nella
storia della cronografia classica.” The most telling influence of Castor came later, with
the Christians, who took over his schemes for their new teleological visions: Mazzarino
1966, 2.2:450. - On this general point, see Millar 2002, 194, 196, 199.
notes to pages 63 – 65. 239