of forty.^59 Apollodorus, by birth an Athenian, used Athenian archonships as the
backbone of his scheme, no doubt in large part because it was much easier to get
an Athenian date of “in the archonship of so-and-so” into iambic verse than the
cumbersome numerals of the Olympiads: anyone who has tried to write Greek
iambics will know that “epi/ep’so-and-so [in the genitive]” scans a lot more eas-
ily than ‘in the third year of the seventeenth Olympiad.”^60 The Athenocentric
backbone of the work, however, is not just a question of prosody; we shall follow
the Athenocentric centripetal momentum of the Hellenistic chronographical tradi-
tion throughout the rest of this chapter, and in chapter 2, we shall see how much it
matters that the real unifying thread in Apollodorus’s work was Athens.
A number of other chronological works could claim our attention before we
reach the transition point where the first Roman begins working in this tradition.^61
Here I note only one, the Chronicaof Castor of Rhodes, written sometime soon
after 61 b.c.e.This work appears immediately before the first Roman works of
synchronistic chronography, and it is of special importance because it for the first
time takes the crucial step of bringing the kingdoms of Asia into the synchronistic
frame of the Hellenized world.^62
THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS
OF ROMAN SYNCHRONISM
Synchronizations between Rome and Greece ultimately depend upon these intra-
Hellenic systems of synchronization. As we shall see throughout, Roman-Greek
synchronizations are inextricable from the Hellenized world ’s attempts to accom-
modate the Romans, and they form an indispensable part of Roman historical con-
sciousness from the start. At the very beginning of the Roman historiographical
tradition we find the Romans using parallelism in time as a mechanism for finding
material when it was necessary to plug the gaps in reconstructing early Roman his-
tory. Pais first documented this favored technique a century ago, showing how, for
example, the story of the catastrophe of the three hundred Fabii at the battle of the
Cremera in 477 b.c.e.was calqued upon the catastrophe of the three hundred
Spartans at Thermopylae in 480 b.c.e.^63 There is far more to such a procedure than
merely casting around for handy stopgap material, for the first practitioners of this
kind of synchronization must have been intent on demonstrating that early Roman
history ranked in dignity with the history of Greece and was entitled to the vener-
ability of proper historiographical treatment.^64
It has long been debated whether any of these parallelisms may perhaps be
- Synchronizing Times I: Greece and Rome