also to have vast political consequences, it was necessary that the distance between
the parallel groups be large, and that the newer of them be substantial in size and
permanently settled, as well as firmly subordinated to the older.”^138 The newer
members of the Roman Empire were indeed “substantial in size and permanently
settled, as well as firmly subordinated to the older”; but these newer members, the
inhabitants of the Hellenized East, thought of themselves as belonging to a far
older and more prestigious culture than their new masters. The stakes were there-
fore very high in the operation of collating the times of Greece and Rome, and the
process saw the whole gamut of possible interactions between the cultures being
played out: snobbery, deference, competition, self-assertion, enlightenment. Both
Greeks and Romans worked at the task, attempting to create a mesh of past time
that would make sense of the present — a present that for centuries was ceaselessly
revolutionary and unpredictable and did not settle into anything like an equilib-
rium until the early Principate. By that time something like a shared Roman and
Greek past had been forged, at least to a degree, with the Romans established as
the only non-Greeks who would be allowed, however grudgingly, to participate
fully in the Hellenistic web of time that shaped the Mediterranean.
In the next chapter we shall go farther back in time, to investigate the way the
Romans and Greeks coped with the problem of how to graft the Romans into the
deep past of the Mediterranean’s time webs, and how to negotiate their transition
from that deep past into the time dimension of history.
Incorporating the World. 67