the western Greek world look like more of an equal partner in Hellas, and
significant synchronisms between Sicily and Greece proper were an important part
of this operation.^22
It has long been a scholarly occupation to point out how many of Timaeus’s
synchronisms appear strained, inconsequential, and foolish. A favorite target has
been Timaeus’s claim that Euripides died on the day Dionysius became tyrant of
Syracuse, so that as the man who wrote tragedies exited the stage the man who was
the protagonist in tragic events entered.^23 It is “a kitschy metaphor devoid of any
serious meaning,” according to Asheri, although in the full version of Timaeus we
might have seen a more serious link, between the advent of the tyranny of
Dionysius in Syracuse and of the “thirty tyrants” in Athens in the same year.^24
Other synchronisms have a more obvious historical symbolism, as may be the case
with the Polybian synchronism we saw above, between Dionysius’s siege of
Rhegium and the Gallic sack of Rome. This synchronism comes from Timaeus,
and via Fabius Pictor and Polybius it becomes a grounding synchronism for the
Roman historiographic tradition.^25 It is possible that Timaeus was already thinking
along the same lines that Walbank suggests for Polybius: the victories of Dionysius
were not just a useful synchronism for Sicilian readers to use for orientation, but
“an example of how a strong power in Sicily or Italy would eventually cross the
straits,” and therefore “a pointer to the First Punic War.”^26 As always with syn-
chronisms, we face the problem of deciding when a coincidence in time has
significance, and, if so, what kind of significance. The issue still faces historians
today, especially with the recent fashion for universal global histories.^27
Timaeus’s synchronistic net could be thrown over Asia as well as Greece, since
he had an interest in the career of Alexander the Great. The birth of Alexander
generated one of his more notoriously portentous synchronisms, according to
which Alexander was born on the day that the temple of Artemis at Ephesus
burned down.^28 The sack of Tyre by Alexander likewise provoked a synchronism,
but one of days, not of years. Timaeus says that a statue of Apollo was looted from
Gela in Sicily by the Carthaginians (in 405 b.c.e.) and was sent to the Carthagin-
ians’ metropolis of Tyre. When Tyre was being besieged by Alexander seventy-
three years later (in 332 b.c.e.), the people of Tyre abused the statue, but it did no
good, because Alexander captured the city “on the same day with the same name
and at the same hour on which the Carthaginians had seized the statue of Apollo
at Gela.”^29 Vattuone attractively suggests that the coincidence is meant to bring
home the message that the impious barbarians of the West still remain unpunished
and a threat, even though Alexander has finally and definitively removed the threat
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East