point to Timaeus as the father of Roman historiography^51 — not just in the sense
that he was the first to bring Rome “within the normal range of Greek knowl-
edge,”^52 but in the sense that he showed the Romans what you had to do to maneu-
ver your way into the larger matrix of Hellenic time frames from a starting posi-
tion on the sidelines.
Timaeus even provided the Romans with a beginning point within the matrix of
Greek time. He plotted the foundation of the city within his time grids, generating
in the process his most famous synchronism of all, the synchronism between the
foundations of Rome and Carthage. This was a radical intervention in terms of the
accepted chronologies of the time, and one that we shall examine further in the
next chapter. For now, we may note that Timaeus came up with the date for the
foundation of Carthage that became canonical, thirty-eight years before Olympiad
1, “814/13 b.c.e.”; and he also placed the foundation of Rome in the same year.^53
Jacoby believed that this heavily symbolic synchronized dating was completely
unthinkable (“ganz undenkbar”) before 264 b.c.e., the outbreak of the First Punic
Wa r ;^54 accordingly, Timaeus will have glimpsed the possible future consequences
of this clash and created his synchrony right at the end of his very long life (he died
within a very few years of the outbreak of the war, and his history stopped in 264
b.c.e., before the Romans crossed into Sicily). There are other possibilities, how-
ever, since Rome and Carthage had long been allies, most recently and signifi-
cantly during Rome ’s war against Pyrrhus, so that the linked origin of the two
cities might have carried a more positive meaning.^55 The crucial point, as Momigli-
ano so clearly saw, lay in the synchronism itself: “Timaeus recognized that Car-
thage and Rome were on the same level. The Greeks, accustomed to respecting
Carthage, now had to attribute the same importance to Rome. Within the strange
symbolism of a coincidence a historical discovery of the first importance was con-
cealed: the rise of Rome to the position of a great power in the West.”^56
The implied symbolism of a linked destiny for Rome and Carthage was very
potent. Rome and Carthage were the uncategorizable odd ones out for the Hellen-
istic Greeks, in that these complex imperial entities could not simply be relegated
to the bald category of “barbarians.” They seemed uniquely anomalous among
their non-Greek neighbors in terms of civic development and level of organiza-
tion — as Aubet puts it, “in the Greek sense, Carthage is the only Phoenician foun-
dation to meet the criteria of a genuine city,”^57 while Rome had been described as
a povli" ïEllhniv", a “Greek city,” by Heraclides Ponticus a generation before
Timaeus.^58 Early on in the history of Greek observation of the two cities we find
evidence for a number of ways of reflecting on the parallelism between them, often
Rome, Carthage, and the Sicilian Paradigm. 53