diately, or even soon. Some Greeks continued to tell the old story of the mythic era
foundation;^176 it may appear initially more surprising that Rome ’s first epic poets,
Naevius and Ennius, continued to adhere to the old version, with Romulus as the
grandson of Aeneas.^177 Naevius was probably writing his Bellum Punicumimme-
diately after the appearance of Fabius Pictor’s History:^178 he was not to know that
Fabius’s new version would one day become the orthodoxy. By the time Ennius
was writing the Annales,however, Fabius’s book was about thirty years old, and
Ennius could also have read the history in Greek written by Cincius Alimentus,
which followed essentially the same story, although moving the foundation date
down a further twenty years, to “728 b.c.e.,” the fourth year of the twelfth
Olympiad.^179 Nonetheless, Ennius wanted to keep to the mainstream Hellenistic
foundation stories that associated Rome ’s beginnings directly with the heroic
age.^180 He, like Naevius, must have conceived of the question as being whether to
place the foundation of the city in heroic time or in historical time, and once the
question is put like that the answer is obvious for a Hellenistic epic poet.^181 Further,
Naevius and Ennius could now restate these origins as being directly linked to the
beginning of universal history, with the fall of Troy leading to the rise of Rome.
By keeping to the older Hellenistic versions, recently validated by Eratosthenes,
who still kept Romulus as Aeneas’s grandson, Naevius and Ennius are behaving
like Greeks rather than like Romans such as Fabius and Cincius — but, then, they
wereGreeks, or at least “semi-Greeks,” as Suetonius puts it.^182 It would take a fully
Roman poet, in a genuinely historical age, to canonize the Roman historians’ ver-
sion of the city’s foundation in epic.^183 Well before Virgil’s time, within decades of
the appearance of Fabius’s History, the balance of power in the Greek and Roman
historiographical tradition had shifted, so that the focalizing time frames were now
Roman, rather than Greek. As we have seen, it had been crucial to Fabius, very
probably following Diocles, to use Olympiad dating as a way offixing Rome
within a Panhellenic chronological framework. In this he had been followed by his
immediate successor, Cincius Alimentus, who likewise wrote in Greek. Cincius is,
however, the last of the Roman historians to use this Panhellenic dating system.^184
Cato began writing his Originessome three decades after Fabius, and his was the
first Roman historical work to be written in Latin prose.^185 With the shift in lan-
guage went a shift in chronological representation. Dionysius of Halicarnassus
explicitly tells us that Cato “does not make Greek time divisions” (ïEllhniko;n me;n
oujc oJrivzei crovnon), and Cato’s date for Rome ’s foundation is accordingly not an
Olympiad date, but “four hundred and thirty-two years after the Trojan War.”^186
The Trojan War, not a Greek athletic festival, is the reference point for dating the
Refining the “Historical”. 99