ers. Romulus is on a fascinating borderland, right on the fringe of what is suscep-
tible to historical treatment. As Pelling observes, to Plutarch Numa lies “just this
side, Romulus just the other side of the boundary.”^109 You can nudge Romulus far-
ther back into the mist or bring him farther out into the sunlight, and the decision
as to whether he goes one way or the other will vary according to the agenda and
genre of each author.^110 Livy and Plutarch are not operating on the basis of
different data sets, and it is not as if one of them is better informed about the
“facts” than the other: they both have the same tradition, one that has a built-in
plasticity concerning this epoch. This does not mean that any of the authors who
treat this period is a fraud, or that any of them is more “correct.” Romulus is there
in the tradition and remained there until the nineteenth century, when his status as
a historical figure was doubted for the first time.^111 He has to be dealt with, one way
or the other, and the very mobility of the various traditions about his epoch gives
an edge to whatever treatment an author brings to bear.
DOWN-DATING FROM
MYTH TO HISTORY
At this point we need to retrace our steps, since we have not yet properly investi-
gated the change from a mythic era for the foundation of the city to this new incip-
iently historical era. In the early third century everyone is agreed that the city was
founded in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, but in the late third century we can
see a new consensus starting to emerge, which eventually places the foundation
somewhere in what we call the mid-eighth century. The canonical version we all
know from Virgil and Livy is an amalgam of these two stories, which preserves
and synchronizes the two chronologies. Aeneas, according to the eventually ortho-
dox synthesis, came to Italy in heroic time but did not found Rome itself; instead,
he or his son founded Alba Longa, which was ruled by a long line of Trojan-
descended kings, and it was from Alba Longa, many years later, that Rome was
founded by Romulus, in historical time.^112 We must not, however, allow the suc-
cess of this eventual synthesizing orthodoxy to distract us from remarking on the
very remarkable chronological relocation that made it necessary in the first place.
Sometime in the third century b.c.e.we have an extraordinary shift in the epoch of
the city’s foundation, a down-dating of hundreds of years from the time of Troy
to the era of incipient history.^113 Why the move from myth to history?
As far as I can see, almost all scholars take it for granted that the new down-
dating was the result of new information from the Roman side. What scholars
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City