might have stopped soon after, with the first literary figures of Rome, but it is sig-
nificant that he carries on until he reaches Accius and Lucilius at the end of the
essay. Only with them is there not simply a literary tradition in Rome but a liter-
ary-critical tradition as well: Accius was, if anything, more famous as a scholar and
literary historian than as a tragic poet, and Lucilius is noted here by Gellius not just
as a poet, but as a critic of the poetry of his predecessors (clarior... in poematis
eorum obtrectandis,49).^115 In other words, Gellius stops when the Romans have
established the foundations not only of a literature but of a literary history, with
the attendant apparatus of literary scholarship inherited from their contemporaries
and predecessors in Alexandria. This is the moment when it has achieved some
kind of parity with Greece in the realm of culture — or at least can be represented
by a partisan Roman, with some kind of plausibility, as having achieved parity.
It is this same cultural perspective that accounts for the fact that none of the
Romans mentioned after the end of the Second Punic War (46 to the close of the
essay) is mentioned in a political or imperial context: all of them are literary. Even
the great Cato figures in this list as an orator(47), that is, in his capacity as the
inventor of Latin prose, rather than as consul, censor, or imperator. This eclipse of
the political or imperial dimension in Gellius’s scamper through people after the
end of the Second Punic War is most revealing. Throughout the essay he has been
charting the synchronism of Greek and Roman politicaland imperialdevelop-
ments, and now, once the war against Hannibal has been won, he stops doing this.
The one mention of a political nature is the embassy of Athenian philosophers to
Rome in 155 b.c.e.(48), where we see the Greek philosophical tradition at the dis-
posal of the Roman state.^116 The key point, of course, is one that emerges obliquely
from this citation of the embassy of philosophers: Greece is now completely under
the thumb of Rome following Rome ’s destruction of Greek military strength after
the Hannibalic War, and Greek knowledge is now harnessed to Roman power.^117
The project of synchronism carries with it implicitly the theme oftranslatio
imperii,the transference of empire; Gellius’s choice of this cut-offdate is a kind of
anticipation of Eusebius’s visual demonstration oftranslatio imperiiwith his dwin-
dling columns.^118 At the end of Gellius’s essay, the Greek “column,” as it were,
drops off, and the Roman “column” is the only one remaining.
Before this climax, however, for much of the essay one has the impression that
Gellius’s synchronisms are working to establish the idea that Rome was for cen-
turies as belated and backward in the imperial realm as in the cultural. The syn-
chronisms highlight the idea that while Greek states were performing heroic deeds
at the center of the world stage, the Romans were engaged in minor brawls in the
Aulus Gellius’s Synchronistic Chapter. 37