of their ancestors, the impious barbarians of the East.^30 Half of the work from
Pindar’s First Pythianremains to be done.
In Timaeus’s eyes, however, the main counterweight to Sicily is Athens, the city
where he spent fifty years working as a historian.^31 His pugnacious sense of defen-
siveness in the face of Athens’ status has often been remarked upon;^32 his declara-
tion that Syracuse was the largest of Greek cities and the most beautiful of all cities
looks very pointed, coming from a resident of Athens.^33 It is important to remem-
ber that Timaeus started writing less than a hundred years after his mother city of
Syracuse had totally annihilated the greatest overseas expedition Athens ever
mounted, and it cannot have been easy for him to cope with what he will have seen
as an Athenian assumption of superiority. One catches a similar atmosphere of
resentment in the peevish cavils of Theopompus of Chios at the way the Athenians
misrepresent the battle of Marathon “and all the other things that the city of the
Athenians brags about and uses to dupe the Hellenes.”^34 Parallels with modern
experiences of colonials in the metropolis will be partially misleading, no doubt,
but they afford some inkling of what will have been at stake.^35 After all, for the
Athenians and the Athenian historiographic tradition, the Sicilians’ role on the
world stage was a very recent affair: “events in the West would not be considered
as part of Hellenic history by Athenians until the West became involved in the
Peloponnesian War.”^36 This is exactly the mentality we detected in Eratosthenes,
Apollodorus, and Aulus Gellius, in whose schemes events in the Roman sphere
only properly become part of Hellenic history when a Greek king invades Italy.
All of these cases are striking instances, once again, of what Irad Malkin meant
when he said that “ ‘snobbery’ was a grossly underrated factor in history — ‘a
superior culture persuades an inferior that to be significant its past must be inter-
dependent with its own.’ ”^37
This feeling of being patronized is part of what motivates Timaeus’s desperate
overcompensation as he tries to show that Sicily and Syracuse were just as vener-
able and significant as the mainland and Athens. He was, for example, the first per-
son to place the rape of Persephone near Enna in Sicily, as part of an attempt to
show that Demeter had blessed the Sicilians with the gift of agriculture first, and
Athens second.^38 Again, he did everything he could to assert the claims of Sicily,
not Athens, to be the cradle of oratory.^39 His attempts to boost the West at the
expense of the East produced apopleptic reactions from the Achaean Polybius,
writing a hundred years later. Polybius had a special need to put Timaeus in his
place, for the Sicilian was his principal predecessor and competitor as a historian of
the West; for all his hostility, Polybius paid Timaeus the compliment of being his
Putting Sicily on the Greek Time Chart. 49