vides an invaluable thought-experiment for anyone trying to develop such a sense,
in the form of the many letters he wrote to Atticus in May and June 45 b.c.e.,
crammed with prosopographical chronological questions about the ten legates
who went to Corinth after its capture in 146 b.c.e.^37 As Cicero attempts to marshal
the names with which Atticus supplies him, and to make sense of the relationships
between them, we can see him using the mentality that a Roman aristocrat devel-
oped by growing up with the Leges Annales, the legislation that governed the min-
imum ages at which it was possible to stand for each of the magistracies. Cicero
and his peers could monitor their position in time almost spatially — this is the sen-
sation that Bettini has brought alive for us so memorably.^38 Romans of the govern-
ing class developed a layered sense of their peer group, with some a little bit ahead,
and some a little bit behind. This mentality emerges very clearly from Cicero’s
Brutusand obviously provided a template for them to map back onto earlier gen-
erations, with an analogous sense of depth.^39 What to us is a matter of numbers
is to Cicero a matter of personal relationships — fathers and sons, uncles and
nephews, junior and senior friends.^40
Without a universal, serial, and numerical system of chronology, then, hooked
on a single agreed point, orientation was only possible with synchronization of
different schemes of time, ones arranged by interval along vertebrae of significant
events with their significant actors. As the examples from Cicero vividly illustrate,
their historical consciousness is less abstracted than ours, for it is anchored in a
series of connecting points that are marked by people and their deeds. Roman years
did not have numbers; they had names, “taking their name from the consul” (annos
a consule nomen habentis,Luc. 7. 441). The Romans’ time horizons are not plotted
out with numbered milestones in a series but dotted with clusters of people in
significant relationships with each other through memorable events. We now turn
to an account of the basic instruments by which these clusters were organized,
before investigating what the entailments of these instruments of organization
could be.
THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS
OF GREEK SYNCHRONISM
My focus is on the consequences of the Romans being fitted in to Greek time
schemes, and a sketch of the Greek instruments of synchronism is therefore indis-
pensable. The Greek networks to which the Romans were being accommodated
were already old by the time the Romans encountered them. The Greek world
- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome