almost within touching distance of Western Greek historical time, Timaeus by no
means jettisoned the Trojan connection simply to jump down to the late ninth cen-
tury. We do not know how he made the connection between the Trojan origin and
the new date of “814/3,” but somehow he did, because we know that he was very
interested in the Trojan ancestry of the Romans.^142 He had learned from the inhab-
itants of Lavinium themselves, so he says, what the Trojan holy objects in
Lavinium were, including a Trojan earthenware vessel.^143 Polybius tells us that
Timaeus interpreted the Roman festival of the Equus October as being the
Romans’ way of commemorating the fall of Troy. It is clear from Polybius’s refer-
ence that Timaeus is extremely well informed, for he actually gives the Latin name
for the Campus Martius —ejn tw'/ Kavmpw/ kaloumevnw/, “in what is called the
Kampos.”^144 His reference to the calendrical date, incidentally, sheds fascinating
light on another time issue. He says the festival is held ejn hJmevra/ tiniv, “on a cer-
tain day,” a phrase that reminds us of the problems posed by the jumble of calen-
dars. A Syracusan based in Athens in the third century could not, it seems, com-
prehensibly translate a Roman date such as the Ides of October into another
calendar, and transliterating “the Ides of October” into Greek, as Plutarch, for
example, later does, would have been meaningless outside Italy in 270 b.c.e.
Even if the details of how Timaeus made the connection between Troy and
Rome are lost, we can still see him performing the same operation that he performs
in the case of the Greeks in the West. He used the first part of his Historiesto set
up one half of a double focus, between mythic precursors and historical followers.
His vision of the Western Mediterranean is that the Greek claims go a long way
back before their arrival in the eighth century — as a Sicilian he cannot simply say,
as Thucydides had, “There is nothing to say about anything Greek in Sicily until
the first colonies.” He had to use a lot of free invention, since the data bank of myth
for the Western Mediterranean was more or less empty. What he needed to do was
to invent an “instant tradition” in order to endow the Greeks of the West with a
glamorous and prestigious mythic inheritance.^145 To this end, he presented myths
showing Greek heroes such as Heracles, Diomedes, and the Argonauts going
through Italy and Sicily, providing a series of charters that could be cashed in by
the later Greek colonists when they arrived.^146 Although the pattern that he follows
is very familiar from Pindar, for example, Timaeus was exerting much originality
here, since before him there is no evidence for any post-Trojan nostoitales in the
West involving any of the Greek heroes apart from Odysseus.^147 Antiochus of
Syracuse, for example, Thucydides’ source for the Sicilian colonies, had no “leg-
endary” dates for precolonial precursors.^148 What Timaeus’s narrative mode was
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City