chapter 5 The Future of Rome in Three Greek Historians of Rome Jonathan J. Price A historical theory of uncertain origin is directly relevant to how Roman historians, particularly those who wrote in Greek, understood the future of Rome: four empires have dominated the world, Rome is the fifth, signifiy- ing either the continuation of a natural process or the end of the historical cycle. This 4+1 model of world empires occurs also in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic, deriving ultimately from the Book of Daniel, where it may be a reworking of a Zoroastrian tradition. 1 So compelling was the idea for the Jews and Christians living in the Roman Empire, nursing messianic dreams, that its absence in a major Jewish thinker of the first century requires explanation. 2 Among historians of Rome the model first appears as a tool of explanation and prediction in Polybius’ Greek history of Rome, then in Latin Aemilius Sura 3 and Pompeius Trogus – in each of these first cases, indirectly, or in quoted fragments – then certainly in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and later Greek writers. Thus, the 4+1 scheme appears in Greek prose literature from as early as the second century BCE, around the time that the Book of Daniel was being redacted. Philologists and historians have naturally been drawn to the compelling questions of origin, dating, and influence, i.e., the direction and circum- stances of travel of an idea and literary trope. This problem, even if it could be conclusively solved, is unimportant to understanding the three Greek historians under investigation here, whose cosmos of literary reference was Greek and Roman historiography and other literature. A foreign germ entering the Greek stream was beyond their ken. 1 In this volume, see the chapters by Noam (Chapter 9), Gruen (Chapter 10), Berthelot (Chapter 6), and Inglebert (Chapter 13); and on Josephus’ use of the model, Davies (Chapter 8) and Rocca (Chapter 7). The connection to the Avesta was made by Flusser 1972: 148–75. The main studies on the four-empires scheme, esp. its Greek manifestations, are: Swain 1940: 1–21; Momigliano 1982: 533–60, esp. 542–6; 1980: 157–62; Hasel 1979: 17–30; Alonso-Núnez 1983: 411–26; Mendels 1981: 330–7; Wiesehöfer 2013: 59–69. 2 Cf. Chapter 6 by Berthelot in this volume. 3 Probably second century BCE, see Swain 1940. 85 www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press Jonathan Price