Incorporating the World. 65
as if the age of Cicero, the age of the late Republic, anticipates the intellectual envi-
ronment of the Principate in this respect as in so many others.^121
INCORPORATING THE WORLD
Intimately related to these movements in chronography are the universal histories
that flourish in these decades, covering history from beginning to end.^122 Even
Livy’s history is also really a universal history or at least has the teleological ten-
dencies of one. Its annalistic, urbi-centric form may appear to militate against its
universal nature, but Livy could plausibly represent the history of the city and the
world eventually becoming coextensive, with the city’s rhythm of annual magis-
tracies becoming a pulse for the whole world.^123 Once again, the phenomenon of
universal history has its beginnings in the age of Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar,
rather than Augustus.^124 Diodorus Siculus begins where Castor begins, with Ninus
of Assyria, and he fixed the end point of his universal history as the start of
Caesar’s Gallic campaigns (1.4.7), in which Caesar carried the boundaries of the
Empire to Ocean: his termination is, as it were, a Western counterpoint to the
Eastern closural point of Castor. Diodorus may have completed his work around
30 b.c.e., but he started around 60 b.c.e.; his case provides a good example of the
“Walter Raleigh” trap of facile periodization, for even though we tend to pigeon-
hole Diodorus as an Augustan author, the conception of the work is late Repub-
lican (not that he “knew” it was “late Republican”).^125 Nonetheless, Augustus’s
reign sees the universal histories flourish, as they consolidate the insights and
achievements of the previous generation, and as they react to his decisive last act
in the drama of incorporating the ancient time lines, for Augustus had brought into
the Empire the last remaining unincorporated element of the Mediterranean
fringe, the primeval kingdom of Egypt. In 30 b.c.e.the circle around the sea’s rim
was finally made complete.^126
If a universal history begins with the earliest ascertainable times, then one of the
most interesting problems facing the writer of such a history is where to stop. The
universal history of Pompeius Trogus took the same beginning point as Castor of
Rhodes, starting with Ninus of Assyria. He went down to the ultimate closural end
point, of the apparent final domination of the world by Augustus, with the sub-
mission of Spain in the West in 19 b.c.e., and the treaty with the Parthians in the
East in 20 b.c.e.^127 This is the same Eastern end point as Castor’s, but forty years
later on. Castor had represented Pompey’s settlement of the East as a definitive