of Romulus and Remus for a good long time before the brothers Ogulnii, in the
year 295 b.c.e., put a statue of the wolf at the base of the Palatine hill where the
twins had been found (Livy 10.23.12). My sole concern here is the chronological
dimension to this story, and I see no reason to doubt that the story of the founders
will have been free floating in time until it needed to be meshed with Greek histo-
riographical norms, either by a Greek or by a Roman. What kind of form the story
had before it became part of Grecizing historiography is another issue. The story
as we have it in Livy or Dionysius of Halicarnassus is organized like the plot of a
Greek drama of exposure and recognition, and that plot form is due either to the
adaptation of the story for the Roman stage or to the artistry of the first person to
write the story up for history — and that first person was almost certainly a Greek,
as we shall shortly see.^126
If it is unlikely that the new down-dating from a “mythical” to a “historical”
foundation date was the result of new indigenous information from the Romans,
we are left still looking for an explanation of the shift. A number of modern schol-
ars appear to think that the new mid-eighth-century dating somehow got it right
after centuries of error, as if tradition was capable of preserving a chronological
structure until it could be fixed in historiographical format.^127 But such views are
fundamentally misconceived. For a start, Rome was not foundedanyway. The
whole issue is a mirage. Large-scale processes over long periods of time eventually
led to what we could call a civic organization on the hills beside the Tiber, but this
is not a “foundation,” certainly not in the terms preserved in the literary tradi-
tion.^128 Still, some modern historians, such as Carandini (1997) and Grandazzi
(1997), would have it that the mid-eighth-century date is “right” in some sense.
Scholars such as these seem to be mesmerized by the overlap between the eventual
canonical date in the literary tradition and the Iron Age huts on the summit of the
Palatine or remains of a wall or a “palace” at its base.^129 The situation, however, is
exactly the same as that so brilliantly described by Burkert in the case of Troy.
Because the “1184” date that the Greeks in the third century eventually settled on
for the fall of Troy happens to overlap with the remains of Troy VIIA, many peo-
ple feel that the date is somehow “right.”^130 But the Greek dates for the fall of Troy,
as Burkert showed, are pure guesses, founded on air, and wildly discrepant for cen-
turies; the apparent historical fit of the overlap between the eventual Roman tradi-
tion and a hypothesized true Roman settlement date is likewise complete and total
coincidence, since the tradition about the foundation of the city is likewise founded
on air, and likewise very discrepant in the beginning, as we have just seen.^131 If the
ancient tradition had fixed on 1000 as the “real” date, then these scholars would all
Down-Dating from Myth to History. 91