between the first founding of the city, in 753, and the refounding that faces Livy
and his contemporaries 365 years after Camillus, in the 20s b.c.e.^198 Exactly the
same structuring appears to underpin the panorama of Roman history on Virgil’s
Shield of Aeneas, where the barely averted destruction of Rome by the Gauls (Aen.
8.652 – 62) comes midway in time between the foundation of the city (8.635) and
the barely averted destruction of Rome by Antonius and Cleopatra (8.671 – 713).^199
In all of these authors, city destruction, whether achieved or barely averted,
leads to refoundation and consequent reconfiguring of identity, in a process that
begins with Troy and continues through the fates of Alba Longa, Veii, and Rome
itself.^200 As Kraus has shown, when Livy begins his next book after the Gallic sack,
he refounds his narrative along with the city, capitalizing on the annalistic tradi-
tion’s identification of the city and history.^201 In an extraordinary moment, the
opening sentences of book 6 tell us that only now is real history beginning. All of
the material in the first five books, Livy now declares, has been “obscure because
of its excessive antiquity” (uetustate nimia obscuras), and because there were few
written records in those early days, while the ones that did exist “for the most part
were destroyed when the city was burnt” (incensa urbe pleraeque interiere,6.1.2).
Everything up until this point, from Troy to the Gallic sack, is suddenly reconfig-
ured as prior, prefoundational. In his preface Livy had drawn a line between myth
and history around the time of the Romulean foundation of the city (ante conditam
condendamue urbem,6), but “the fresh start in 390 redraws the limits of the histor-
ically verifiable.”^202 We now have a new entry into history, with a newly rebuilt city
and a newly solid evidential base for its written commemoration (6.1.3):
Clariora deinceps certioraque ab secunda origine uelut ab stirpibus laetius
feraciusque renatae urbis gesta domi militiaeque exponentur.
From here there will be a more clear and definite exposition of the domestic
and military history of the city, reborn from a second origin, as if from the
old roots, with a more fertile and fruitful growth.^203Livy here is picking up on the annalistic history of Claudius Quadrigarius, who
had written about fifty years earlier. We know that Claudius began his history with
the sack of Rome by the Gauls, no doubt on the grounds we see alluded to in Livy,
that no history was possible before then, thanks to the destruction of monuments
and archives.^204
We have already seen how the Roman tradition picks up demarcations that are
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City