out, Syracuse was easily the most powerful single Greek state of the day. His offer,
however, is dismissed by the Spartans and Athenians with two pieces of Homeric
one-upmanship: the Spartan ambassador paraphrases an Iliadic line in order to say
that Agamemnon would turn in his grave if he heard that Spartans were under the
command of a Syracusan;^13 the Athenian ambassador makes the usual snobbish
claim to autochthony and backs it up with the usual Athenian Homeric quotation
about the Athenian contingent in the catalogue in Iliad2.^14 The cultural prestige of
Homer can be harnessed by the descendants of the Iliadic heroes in order to trump
the mere military might of the colonial upstarts.
This context of keen cultural and military rivalry is important to bear in mind
when we read what Herodotus says shortly afterwards about the synchronism
between Himera and Salamis (7.166). It is often casually said that Herodotus
reports that the battles were fought on the same day, but the synchronism is all part
of a report of “what the Sicilians say,” with Herodotus not vouching explicitly for
any of it. Only eight pages earlier, after all, comes the famous passage where he
declares that his duty is to report what people say, not to believe it, and that this
holds for the whole work (7.152.3); the context there is very similar, reporting the
various stories about why the Argives did not join in the common defense against
the Persians. When Herodotus, then, says that the Sicilians say that the battles of
Himera and Salamis took place on the same day, we must remind ourselves that the
synchronism comes in the middle of his report of the Sicilian version of why Gelon
did not help the Greeks against the Persians. The mainland version may reflect
badly on Gelon, making his vanity and colonial gaucheness the stumbling block,
but the Sicilian version exculpates him by saying that he was threatened by the
Carthaginians and had to concentrate on his self-defense; it is this context that
motivates the discussion of his victory at Himera, and the synchronism of Himera
and Salamis (165 – 166.1).
Here Herodotus is mediating a long-standing Sicilian project of integration
together with competition. The synchronism of Himera and Salamis is a special
case in its claim that the Sicilians are sharing the same anti-barbarian burden as the
mainland Greeks, but it is part of a general attempt on the part of the colonists to
make meaningful connections between their experience and that of the old home-
land, attempting to put themselves on the map — in particular, on the map of
shared historical time. Diodorus Siculus, for example, notes that “the Pelopon-
nesian war in Greece and the first war between Dionysius and Carthage in Sicily
ended roughly together.”^15 The Sicilians are not alone in this, for we can see other
western Greeks trying to ensure that they are plotted onto the time maps of Hellas.
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East