seem to assume is that on one side you have all the Greeks telling their foundation
stories from the Trojan era, while on the other side you have the Romans telling
themselves an internal version about Romulus, a version with some kind of
chronology, one that fixed Romulus somewhere in “the eighth century”; what hap-
pens then, so the assumption appears to go, is that suddenly people notice the dis-
crepancy and have to come up with some way of papering over the cracks — hence
the Alban king list.^114 But this way of looking at things obscures two crucial issues.
First of all, as we shall see, it was Greek historians who first presented a historical
date for the foundation of the city, not Roman historians or Roman tradition, and
there is no reason to think that the Greek historians, after centuries of happily
playing their own game, suddenly started paying deferential attention to what the
Romans were saying.^115 These Greeks must have had their own reasons for down-
dating; they did not do it because they had learned a new truth from the Romans,
or from the Latins.^116 And here we meet the second important question that the
orthodoxy begs — did the Romans have a date for the foundation of the city any-
way before they got one from the Greeks? What kind of format could have gener-
ated and preserved such knowledge — or “knowledge” — in third-century Rome?
Here we are materially assisted by the important paper of Purcell (2003), argu-
ing for a historical sense in Rome already in the fifth century, before the develop-
ment of a literary historiographical tradition in the late third century. One of his
strongest pieces of evidence for preliterary Roman historical thinking helps the
point I am trying to establish, that any historical sense the Romans had in the third
century is unlikely to have included an indigenous date for the foundation of the
city. Purcell rightly highlights the remarkable aedileship of Cn. Flavius, in 304
b.c.e., when Flavius dedicated, and dated, a sanctuary of Concordia. The dating
convention he used fixed his dedication of Concordia in the 204th year post Capito-
linam aedem dedicatam,“the 204th year after the dedication of the Capitoline tem-
ple [of Jupiter]” (Pliny HN33.19). The year of the dedication of the Capitoline
temple is also remembered in later tradition as the year of the foundation of the
Republic; so we have here an important foundational moment as an era marker.^117
As Purcell points out, Flavius “did not employ the era of the foundation of the
city.”^118 Now, Purcell comments that at the time of Flavius, around 300 b.c.e.,
someone could well have “synchronize[d] a date for the foundation with an inter-
nal or an external chronological system,” but I think we should draw the opposite
conclusion, that an era based on the dedication of the temple is what had to be used
by anyone wanting to do dating before an era was agreed upon for the foundation
of the city.^119
Down-Dating from Myth to History. 89