illustration of Gellius’s Athenian focalization that the battle of Chaeronea itself is
described as the battle where Philip conquered the Athenians(30). This is scarcely
an obvious way to describe the opposing sides — in leaving out the Thebans, this
perspective is like describing El Alamein as the battle where Montgomery defeated
the Italians. Gellius is careful to mark the end of the Spartan empire (26) and of the
Persian empire (34), thus revealing his interest in the theme of succession of
empires; but the dominant interest throughout is in the Athenians. The last Greeks
mentioned in the whole essay are the heads of the philosophical schools at Athens
sent by the people of Athens on an embassy to Rome (48).
Gellius’s essay is the tip of a large Athenocentric iceberg, which the next chap-
ter will explore in more detail. A history of synchronism in the Mediterranean
from the invasion of Xerxes onwards must also be a history of Athenocentrism in
the Mediterranean. Gellius’s little essay alerts us to this point, as it alerts us to the
importance of the Sicilian connection and to the theme of succession of empire.
Above all, by illustrating how synchronization is a tool for thinking about cross-
cultural interaction, highlighting difference as much as similarity in the process,
Gellius’s essay shows that working with synchronization is fundamental to the
understanding of Roman Hellenization. It is not possible to think systematically
about Roman Hellenization without some kind of picture of the differing histori-
cal development of the Greek and Roman cultures, and that is a picture that can be
gained only by sustained attention to synchronization. Synchronism becomes
another window onto the comparison mentality, and to its fundamental role in
Roman culture.^127 Even in Greek culture this mentality eventually becomes in-
escapable, as we see most dramatically with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives,a century
before Gellius, in which the Greek past is presented “as half of a diptych, face-to-
face with, and mirroring, the Roman past,” creating a fictitious “partnership of
equals” for the evolving Empire.^128 The fundamental mind-set of the synchronizer
is a comparative one, operating on events as if constructing gigantic similes,
manipulating tenors and vehicles on an enormous scale, using the comparison
trope to highlight sameness or difference, not between Hector and a lion or Gor-
gythion and a poppy, but between Syracuse and Athens, Rome and Greece.
Even as Gellius’s essay reminds us of the indispensable importance of the com-
parative exercise of synchronism, it brings home how much harder the operation
of synchronism was for the ancients, and how much more out in the open the pro-
cess of alignment was. While we can use our universal numerical dating system as
a synchromesh to make the differentially whirling gears of all dating systems inter-
lock without any graunching, their synchronistic gearboxes had no such smooth-
Aulus Gellius’s Synchronistic Chapter. 41