tion of Sparta.^192 What we see in the Ennius passage, in other words, is that the city
was virtually destroyed and came within an ace of fulfilling the seven-hundred-
year doom. The point will have been accentuated by Ennius’s book divisions.
Camillus’s speech comes at the end of book 4, and the regal period ended with
book 3, so that up to this point in the Annaleswe have had only one self-contained
volume of Republican history, and if things had gone differently that might have
been all we had.^193
Livy activates the power of this Ennian symbolic numeral, even as he corrects
Ennius’s dating, with his allusion to the seven hundred years of Rome (Pref. 4):
Res est praeterea et immensi operis, ut quae supra septingentesimum annum
repetatur et quae ab exiguis profecta initiis eo creuerit ut iam magnitudine
laboret sua.
In addition, the matter is of immeasurable scope, in that it must be taken back
past the seven hundredth year, and having started from small beginnings has
grown to the stage that it is now laboring under its own size.^194Chaplin has argued that Livy’s preface is constructing recent Roman history as a
death, with a possible rebirth to come:^195 the Republic has been destroyed, and the
Romans of Livy’s time are like the Romans of Camillus’s time, faced with the task
of refounding the city after it has only just escaped its seven-hundred-year doom.
In Livy’s treatment of the Roman response to the sack of the city by the Gauls,
we can see him returning to the Ennian theme of rebirth from destruction,
although this time using different significant numbers. Having exploited the numi-
nous associations of Ennius’s seven hundred years in his preface, Livy now pro-
duces another numinous numeral for the span from foundation to sack, one that
conforms with the modern orthodox chronology. Livy has Camillus deliver a
mighty speech to convince his fellow citizens not to abandon Rome for the site of
Veii (5.51 – 54).^196 When Livy’s Camillus echoes Ennius’s by counting offthe years
since the foundation, it appears that some kind of great year has gone by. From
Romulus’s foundation down to the sack by the Gauls there have been as many
years as there are days in a year: Trecentensimus sexagensimus quintus annus urbis,
Quirites, agitur(“This is the 365th year of the city, Quirites,” 5.54.5). This is of
course a calculation that fully resonates only after Caesar’s reform of the calendar,
when a Roman year for the first time had 365 days.^197 This counting places
Camillus’s refounding of the city at a pivotal point in time, precisely halfway
Refounding the City: Ennius, Livy, Virgil. 101