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[6] He instituted also the annual office that is held in highest honour, which the Syracusans call the "amphipoly" of Zeus Olympius.1 To this, the first priest elected was Callimenes, the son of Alcadas, and henceforth the Syracusans continued to designate the years by these officials down to the time of my writing this history and of the change in their form of government. For when the Romans shared their citizenship with the Greeks of Sicily, the office of these priests became insignificant, after having been important for over three hundred years.2

Such was the condition of affairs in Sicily.

1 This priesthood is not mentioned by Plutarch, and may be a personal observation of Diodorus himself.

2 This humbling of the amphipolate probably consisted in making it no longer eponymous; instead of a local priesthood, the Syracusans thereafter dated by the Roman consuls. The reference may be to the grant of jus Latii to the Sicilians by Caesar (by 44 B.C.: Cicero Ad Atticum 14.12.1), or to later grants by Augustus (A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (1939), 175).

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