P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica and M. Claudius Marcellus, both for the second time.^29
The Roman side of this time event, then, is anchored in Cicero’s mind with the
names of the consuls, but at the end of the extract we see him asking for an
Athenian equivalent, a prominent Epicurean and the leading Athenian politicians
of the time, so that he can have a series of connecting points, bridges, to link up
affairs at Athens with the names of the Roman consuls. For us, the bare “155” does
virtually all the work of giving a sense of depth and relative location in time, but
Cicero needs names to provide a peopled background that will give him some rec-
ognizable contours against which to measure the position of Carneades and his
embassy.^30
The argument so far produces an important result for our concern in the first
two chapters, of investigating what is at stake in correlating dates in the time charts
of Greece and the time charts of Rome. We are now in a position to see that cor-
relating Greek and Roman datesmeans correlating Greek and Roman events.
There is, in fact, no Greek or Latin word for “date.” An ancient date is an event —
or, to be more precise, any date is a relationship between two or more events. As
inhabitants of the b.c.e./c.e.grid, we simply cannot help thinking of ancient writ-
ers as working with dates, which to us are numbers. But they are not connecting
numbers; they are connecting significant events and people.^31 In so doing they are
not placing events within a preexisting time frame; they are constructing a time
frame within which the events have meaning.^32 Again, the ultimatefoundation of
our modern chronological system is, likewise, the connecting of events, but that
event-based substratum is almost always hidden from us by the apparent abstrac-
tion of the numbers within their own coherent framework, and this “absolute
time” has an autonomy that can all too easily exempt us from the difficult but
rewarding work in which the ancients were inescapably involved, of apprehending
past time as a set of relationships between events, people, and places, or as parallel
series — discrete or interpenetrating — of such relationships.^33
A number of important recent studies have shed light on the profound differ-
ences between our modern “absolute time” and their “relative time,” from Hunter
(1982) to Wilcox (1987) and Shaw (2003).^34 These scholars have made it easier for
their successors to grasp the fact that ancient writers are not working with “dates”
under another guise, but with relative frames of time that are always being recon-
structed in each project, even if many of the anchoring points stay constant.^35
Nonetheless, it remains an imaginative challenge of the first order to attempt to
intuit how the Romans and Greeks were able to move around in past time without
numerical coordinates.^36 Once again, Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus pro-
Every Date a Synchronism. 15