338 Battle of Chaeronea, Philip defeats the allied Greeks
336–323 Reign of Alexander of Macedon
335 Alexander destroys Thebes; Aristotle founds the Lyceum
334 Alexander invades the Persian Empire
333 Battle of Issus, Alexander defeats Darius III
331 Foundation of Alexandria; Battle of Gaugamela, Alexander defeats Darius III a second time
323–30 Greek ‘Hellenistic’ period
323 Alexander prepares to attack Arabia; death of Alexander at Babylon
323–c. 281 Alexander’s generals divide up his empire
322 Death of Demosthenes
321 Battle of the Caudine Forks
c. 300 Foundation of Greek city at Ai-Khanoum (modern Afghanistan)
285–246 Callimachus active
280 King Pyrrhus invades southern Italy
279 Celts invade Greece
c. 271–216 Reign of Hieron II, king of Syracuse
264–241 First Punic War
241–197 Reign of Attalus I, king of Pergamum
241 Carthage’s domain in Sicily becomes the first Roman province
218–201 Second Punic War
216 Battle of Cannae, Hannibal annihilates a Roman army
211 Roman capture of Syracuse; death of Archimedes
202 Battle of Zama (modern Tunisia), Romans defeat Hannibal
197 Battle of Cynoscephalae, Greece, Roman victory over Philip V of Macedon
192–188 Syrian War between Rome and the Seleucid Antiochus III
after 184 Great Altar of Pergamum
168 Battle of Pydna, Greece, Flamininus defeats Perseus of Macedon
166 Rome makes Delos a free port
c. 150–100 Sanctuary of Fortuna, Praeneste
146 Roman destruction of Corinth; Greece in effect a Roman province
146 Roman destruction of Carthage
133 Land reforms of Tiberius Gracchus
123 Land reforms of Gaius Gracchus
c. 118 Death of Polybius, Greek historian of Rome’s rise to world empire
107 Army reform of the consul Marius
91–89 War between Rome and her Italian allies (‘Social War’)
81 Dictatorship of Sulla
73–71 Revolt of Spartacus
c. 70 onwards Greek philosopher Philodemus active in Rome
69 Birth of Cleopatra, future Egyptian queen
63 Pompey’s settlement of the east; the last Seleucid king deposed; Syria a Roman province; death of Mithradates, king of Pontus
c. 60 Antikythera shipwreck
58–51 Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul
55–54 Caesar’s two invasions of Britain
48 Battle of Pharsalus, Greece, Caesar defeats Pompey
44 Caesar’s on-off dictatorship made perpetual; murder of Caesar
43 Antony, Octavian and Lepidus form (‘Second’) Triumvirate; murder of Cicero
42 Battle of Philippi, Antony and Octavian defeat republicans
31 Battle of Actium, Octavian defeats Antony and Cleopatra
30 Suicide of Cleopatra; Egypt a Roman province
30 Octavian sole ruler
27 Octavian claims to have restored the republic; Senate bestows the title of Augustus
19 Death of Virgil
AD
AD
8 Ovid exiled to Tomis (modern Romania)
14 Death of Augustus
c. 30 Traditional date for the death of Jesus, Jerusalem
37–41 Gaius (‘Caligula’) emperor
41–54 Claudius emperor
43 Lycia (south-west Turkey) a Roman province
43 Claudius invades Britain
54–68 Nero emperor
64 Great Fire of Rome
65 Suicide of Seneca
66–68 Nero’s tour of Greece
68–69 Year of the Four Emperors
79 Eruption of Mt Vesuvius, Pompeii and Herculaneum destroyed
81–96 Domitian emperor
98–117 Trajan emperor
c. 100–120 Tacitus the historian active
c. 110 Pliny corresponds with Trajan about Christians
115 Jewish revolt in North Africa and Cyprus
117–138 Reign of Hadrian; Hadrian’s Wall built in Britain
132–135 Hadrian suppresses a revolt in Judaea; Jerusalem renamed Aelia Capitolina
147 Vilia Procla repairs the theatre at Patara, Lycia
161–180 Marcus Aurelius emperor
177 Trials of Christians in Lugdunum (Lyon)
193–211 Septimius Severus emperor
c. 202 Cassius Dio starts his Roman history
212 ‘Antonine constitution’ extends Roman citizenship to most inhabitants of the empire
235–238 Maximinus reigns
246 Sasanid lineage comes to power in Persia
249 Edict of Decius requiring pagan sacrifices of all Romans
267/8 Herulian Goths devastate Athens
270 Zenobia of Palmyra seizes Alexandria
c. 270–275 Aurelian emperor
284–305 Diocletian emperor
293 Tetrarchy created; murder of Carausius, usurper based in Britain
301 Diocletian’s Price Edict
306–337 Constantine I emperor
312 Battle of the Milvian Bridge
324 Constantine re-founds Byzantium as Constantinople
325 Council of Nicaea; Nicene Creed
c. 327 Empress Helena visits Jerusalem
337–361 Constantius II emperor
363 Julian killed fighting Sasanid Persia
378 Battle of Adrianople; Goths defeat and kill the emperor Valens
379–395 Theodosius I emperor
c. 393 Ammianus Marcellinus writes his history
395 Division of the empire between west and east
410 Visigoths sack Rome
429 Vandals cross into Roman Africa
450 Death of Galla Placidia
451 Roman victory over Attila (north-east France)
476 Odoacer deposes the last western emperor
527–565 Justinian emperor
632 Death of the Prophet Muhammad
637 Arab conquest of Jerusalem
NOTES
NB. I have limited myself in the main to citing sources for the book’s direct quotations.
Prologue
‘repeated human experiences’: the formulation of the novelist Hilary Mantel in her fourth Reith Lecture broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 11 July 2017.
‘Wonders are many’: Sophocles, Antigone, line 332.
‘On, you men of Greece!’: Aeschylus, Persians, lines 402–5.
Freedom as a ‘criterion of civilized modernity’: David Kelly and Anthony Reid editors, Asian Freedoms: the Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 1998), p. 11.
‘For if it were proposed’: Herodotus 3, 38, 1.
‘the kinship of all Greeks’: Herodotus 8, 144, 2.
‘super-culture’: Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History (New York, 1956), p. 402.
‘He immersed himself in the studies’: Pseudo-Aurelius Victor, Epitome de Caesaribus 14, 2.
‘What is more precarious’: Maximus Confessor, Letters 14 (PG 91, 540A–541B).
1 The Dawn of Greek Civilization
‘harsh, rustic’: Aelius Aristides, On Rome 1, 31–38 (165–168D), trans. Charles Behr.
‘Minos is the first’: Thucydides 1, 4.
2 The Rise of the Hellenes
‘the country now called Hellas’: Thucydides 1, 1.
‘No arts, no letters’: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13.
‘killed’ ritually (Lefkandi building): see now Angélique Labrude in Anastasia Dakouri-Hill and Michael J. Boyd, eds, Staging Death (Berlin, 2016), pp. 307–8.
‘Achilles’ wrath’: Homer, Iliad 1, 1–8. Quoted from Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, vol. 1 (London, 1801), p. 4, lines 1–8.
‘Like leaves on trees’: Homer, Iliad 6, 146–148. Quoted from Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, vol. 1
(London, 1801), p. 177, lines 181–3.
‘A well-prov’d casque’: Homer, Iliad 10, 261–265. Quoted from Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, vol. 1 (London, 1801), p. 296, lines 309–12.
‘He who of all the dancers’: Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1992), p. 58, citing Lilian Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, 2nd edn, revised Alan Johnston (Oxford, 1990), p. 76, no. 1.
‘The swarming populace’: Homer, Iliad 23, 257–260. Quoted from Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, vol. 2 (London, 1801), pp. 324–5, lines 321–5.
‘And from Hellen’: Hesiod, Catalogues of Women, fragment 4.
3 New Things
‘Menelaus’ Helen’: Hector Catling and Helena Cavanagh, Kadmos 15 (1976), pp. 145–57. The translation of the Greek is that of Robert Parker: www.academia.edu/22684765/The_Cult_of_Helen_and_Menelaos_in_the_Spartan_Menelaion (accessed 7 October 2016).
‘May God be kind’ (Dreros inscription): Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC (Oxford, 1969, revised edn 1988), no. 2.
‘the warfare in which those spear-famed lords’: Archilochus fragment 3.
‘All wars were fought individually’: Thucydides 1, 15.
‘to attend the funeral of Amphidamas’: Plutarch, Moralia 153f.
‘I gave the common folk’ and ‘shaking off’: Plutarch, Solon 18. 4 and 16. 3.
‘heralds ran before them’: Herodotus 1, 60.
‘They [the Greeks] invented mathematics’: Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1962), p. 25.
‘Whence things have their origin’: ‘Anaximander (c. 620–546 B.C.E.)’, by Dirk L. Couprie, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161–0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/ (accessed 8 October 2016).
‘Thales, who was in the encampment’: Herodotus 1, 75.
‘Choræbus, the Athenian’: Pliny, Natural History 1, 7, 56.
‘Now is the floor clean’: Xenophanes, fragment 1 (Diels), trans. John Burnet.
4 As Rich as Croesus
‘You yourself wait’: Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 630–640.
‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts’: Jeremiah 7, 21.
‘The chief magistrates who are in office’: Inscriptiones Graecae 12, 5, no. 647, lines 6–16.
‘afterwards, when the victim was burnt’: Porphyry, On abstinence from animal food, 4, 15, trans. Thomas Taylor.
‘while fighting as an ally of the Babylonians’: Alcaeus, fragment 350 (Lobel-Page).
‘the day was suddenly turned to night’: Herodotus 1, 74, 2.
‘Like a lioness’: Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh 8, 61–2.
‘The lion thus’: Homer, Iliad 18, 318–323. For the comparison with the Epic of Gilgamesh see Johannes Haubold, Greece and Mesopotamia (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 22–3.
‘When King Psammetichus came’: Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC (Oxford, 1969, revised edn 1988), no. 7.
‘But you keep babbling’ (new Sappho): Dirk Obbink, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 189 (2014), pp. 32–49.
Charaxus and Rhodopis: Herodotus 2, 135.
‘executed columns – fine works’: Apollo-temple inscription in Gillian Shepherd in Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees, eds, Aristocracy in Antiquity (Swansea, 2015), pp. 367–70.
‘The Lydians . . . were the first men’: Herodotus 1, 94, 1.
‘Walwet’: Koray Konuk in William Metcalf, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage (Oxford, 2012), p. 47.
KROIΣOΣ (Croesus) inscription, Ephesus: BM GR 1872.4–5.19, discussed in Brian Cook, Greek Inscriptions (London, 1987), pp. 17–18.
‘after hearing at Lydian feasts’: Pindar, fragment 125 (Snell).
‘dainty ways learnt from the Lydians’: Xenophanes, fragment 3 (Diels).
Statue from near Miletus: Berlin inventory 1664; noted in Erich Kistler’s discussion of Lydian luxury in Linda Marie Gunther and Paolo Filigheddu, eds, Tryphe und Kultritual im archaischen Kleinasien (Wiesbaden, 2011), p. 60.
‘Clearchus says that Polycrates’: Clearchus of Soli, fragment 44 (Wehrli) cited by Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12, 540f.
‘Stay ten miles off Cape Malea’: www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/Elafonisos (accessed 25 January 2018).
‘The one leads straight to Asia’: Strabo 8, 6, 20.
5 Great Greeks
‘Great Hellas’: Strabo 6, 1, 2; Pliny, Natural History 3, 95 (‘Magna Graecia’).
‘by earthquakes, and by eruptions of fire’ (Pithecusae): Strabo 5, 4, 9.
‘the delicious cup of Nestor’: I follow the translation of this graffito in Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1992), p. 58.
‘bare hillsides flaming yellow’: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, trans. Archibald Colquhoun, The Leopard (London, 1988), p. 55.
ΠIBE graffito, Morgantina: Carla Antonaccio and Tim Sgea in Laura Manicalco, ed., Morgantina duemilaquindici: La ricerca archeologica sessant’anni dall’avvio degli scavi (Palermo, 2015), pp. 59–67.
‘When the men of Acragas’: Polyaenus, Stratagems 5, 1, 3.
Sixty talents of gold: Selinus temple inscription in Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC (Oxford, 1969, revised edn 1988) no. 38, now on display in the reopened Palermo Archaeological Museum.
Ghosts at Selinus: Michael H. Jameson, David R. Jordan and Roy D. Kotansky, A Lex Sacra from Selinous (Durham, North Carolina, 1993), pp. 15 and 17 (translation). See Robert L. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography II. Commentary (Oxford, 2015), pp. 70–1 with n. 267.
A Carthaginian ‘portion’ of Archaic Sicily: Justin 18, 7.
‘the part of Sicily which the Carthaginians control’ (509 BC): Polybius 3, 22, 10.
‘chief poet of comedy’: Plato, Theaetetus 152e.
‘in plan and size’: Polybius 9, 27, 9.
‘lord of Sicily’ (Gelon): Herodotus 7, 157.
6 Meet the (Western) Neighbours
Roman translation of Mago’s manual: Columella, De re rustica 1, 1, 12.
‘Presently a man’: G. Flaubert, Salambô, trans. May French Sheldon (London and New York, 1886), p. 354.
‘so that each of the children’: Diodorus Siculus 20, 14, 6.
Abraham: Genesis 22, 1–19.
On the debate about Carthaginian child sacrifice: Paolo Xella, Valentina Melchiorri and Peter van Dommelen, Antiquity 87 (2013), pp. 1199–207; Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo and José Ángel Zamora López, Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici, 29–30 (2012–13), pp. 159–92.
Carthage’s political stability: Aristotle, Politics 2, 1272b.
‘judgment and training’: Cicero, On the Republic 1, fragment 1, trans. David Fott.
Punic amphorae: Babette Bechtold and Roald Docter in Motya and the Phoenician Ceramic Repertoire (Rome, 2010), pp. 85–116; Laura Portas and five others, Journal of Biological Research 88 (2015), pp. 166–9.
‘The intervening country’: Diodorus Siculus 20, 8, 3–4.
Supplies from Sardinia (480 BC): Diodorus Siculus 11, 20, 4.
‘At the present day’: Pseudo-Aristotle, ‘On marvellous things heard’ (traditionally known by its Latin title, ‘De mirabilibus auscultationibus’), 100, trans. L. D. Dowdall, in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, NJ, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1282.
Sardinian survey results: Andrea Roppa and Peter van Dommelen, Journal of Roman Archaeology 25 (2012), pp. 49–68.
‘In Etruria’: Pseudo-Aristotle, ‘On marvellous things heard’ (as above), 93, trans. L. D. Dowdall, in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, NJ, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1284.
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