from this work shows a system of “x years from a to b” (“80 years from the fall of
Troy to the return of the Heraclids,” and so on), until we finally get to Alexander’s
death, roughly a hundred years before Eratosthenes; the death of Alexander is
such a famous event that readers can construct their own links back to it, just as
any reader of this book could construct his or her own links via family back to the
time of the First World War.^28
Any construction of the past that involved more than one community meant
that you needed more than one column of events, and you needed a series of
significant Aunt Agatha moments in each column, which could then be used as
points of orientation for parallel synchronization. Cicero provides a fine example
in a letter he wrote to Atticus on 19 March 45 b.c.e., requesting historical infor-
mation, needed for background in his Academica,concerning the year “155 b.c.e.”
(Att.12.23.2 = Shackleton Bailey [1965 – 70] 262.2):
quibus consulibus Carneades et ea legatio Romam uenerit scriptum est in tuo
annali. haec nunc quaero, quae causa fuerit — de Oropo, opinor, sed certum
nescio; et, si ita est, quae controuersiae. praeterea, qui eo tempore nobilis
Epicureus fuerit Athenisque praefuerit hortis, qui etiam Athenis politikoi;
fuerint illustres. quae te etiam ex Apollodori puto posse inuenire.
It is written in your Book of Annals in which consuls Carneades and that
embassy came to Rome. What I now want to know is their business — Oropus
I think it was, but I don’t know for certain; and if that is it, what were the
points at issue. Furthermore, tell me of a notable Epicurean of the period,
head of the Garden at Athens; also who were the leading Athenian politicians
of the period. I think you can get the information from Apollodorus’ book
among others.First of all, it is worth pausing over the first two Latin words in this quotation,
quibus consulibus.I have given the excellent translation of Shackleton Bailey, apart
from the first sentence, where his version almost imperceptibly miscues Cicero’s
Latin by domesticating it into the equivalent of what an English speaker would
have said. “Your Annals give the year in which Carneades and that embassy came
to Rome” is Shackleton Bailey’s version, and my own “in which consuls” defin-
itely sounds unnatural in comparison, but this more literal phrasing brings out the
way in which the Romans marked the year with the names of the two consuls, not
with a number. Their phrasing is not straightforwardly a date, but an event —
the holding of supreme power by so-and-so and so-and-so, in this case by
- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome