case of Eratosthenes we would then have a classic and overarching example of
what Mazzarino has called the “diastematic” system of dating, which sets up major
events as posts to establish time intervals.^93
Part of the reason that discussion of the first Olympiad is so vexed is that schol-
ars since Scaliger have tended to have a misguided reverence for the supposed his-
torical sense and scientific rigor of the act of demarcating the first Olympiad as the
beginning of proper history.^94 It really is very curious how many modern histori-
ans respond to this move of Eratosthenes by admiring the apparent historical pre-
cision and discrimination of their distant “colleague,” and also how many of them
can show a touching faith in the idea that Greek history somehow does get more
secure or more “historical” around 776, whereas, as we have already seen, the
Greek historical tradition actually knew nothing worth knowing about the early
eighth century. Timaeus’s and Eratosthenes’ watershed of the first Olympiad is not
a finding on the basis of research, any more than was the Hippocratics’ discovery
of the wandering womb or Freud ’s discovery of the id, ego, and superego. Timaeus
and Eratosthenes did not use actual archival records to discover as a new matter of
fact that “776” was when the first victory occurred, because there wereno actual
archival records, and the lists they were working with were not descendants of
memorized lists, as many still wish to believe.^95 Nor is it the case that Greek his-
tory actually somehow in fact becomes more illuminated or accessible for Timaeus
and Eratosthenes around the 770s. The establishment of the first Olympiad as a
staging post between Troy and the contemporary world is a rhetorical move, an-
other gambit in the ongoing scholarly exercise of looking more scientific, authori-
tative, and discriminatory, less naïve and credulous. The apparent precision of sur-
veying differing degrees of historicity is part of this exercise. The real scholarly
value of the first Olympiad was of course synchronistic. If we frame the question
as “Why were the Olympic Games chosen as the backbone of Panhellenic his-
tory?” then the answer is obvious — because the Olympic Games could be plausi-
bly represented as the oldest Panhellenic institution and therefore provided the
farthest point back into time that you could push a universal synchronism hook.^96
Let me sum up before we turn explicitly to Rome. I have tried to reassert that
historiography did operate with a distinction between myth and history, even
though it was never universal or clear-cut and could serve many different pur-
poses; I have also argued that this distinction could often have a chronological
dimension. There were no universally agreed hard-and-fast divisions between
myth and history, but, equally, the act of making a division or the realization that
there was an issue was always liable to come into play. The divide in ancient his-
Dividing Up the Past. 85