refoundation and rebirth. The history of the city keeps getting restarted at such
crucial transition moments, when repetitive patterns of quasi-cyclical destruction
and refoundation replay themselves, in a fascinating interplay between a drive for
onward narrative continuity and the threat of eddying, repetitious, circularity.^211 It
is poignant to observe the power of this theme still persisting in the fifth century
c.e., when Rutilius Namatianus, six years after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths
in 410 c.e., can hail Rome ’s potential to bounce back from disaster, citing its even-
tual defeat of Brennus, who led the Gauls to the sack of Rome, and of the Samnites,
Pyrrhus, and Hannibal:^212 “You, Rome, are built up,” he claims, “by the very thing
that undoes other powers: the pattern of your rebirth is the ability to grow from
your calamities” (illud te reparat quod cetera regna resoluit:/ordo renascendi est
crescere posse malis,139 – 40). Each of these key marker moments in time may be-
come a new opportunity for the community to reimagine itself, as the epochal mo-
ment produces a new beginning point from which the community may imagine its
progress forward into time, measured against its backward extension into time.^213
REPUBLIC AND EMPIRE
A final epochal moment for us to plot into this sequence is the foundation of the
Republic, traditionally dated to 509 b.c.e., and linked to the inauguration of the
temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as we have seen.^214 Livy makes it plain at the
beginning of his second book, which inaugurates the new Republic after the first
self-contained book of regal history, that this is another “origin,” the origin of lib-
erty (2.1.7):
Libertatis autem originem inde magis quia annuum imperium consulare
factum est quam quod deminutum quicquam sit ex regia potestate numeres.
Moreover you may reckon the origin of liberty as coming more from the fact
that the consuls’ power was made annual than from any subtraction made
from the king’s authority.^215Kraus has finely demonstrated how this new origin of liberty under the Republic
is tied in to the same nexus of rebirth after catastrophe as Livy describes at the
beginning of book 6. She shows the close verbal links between the openings of
books 2 and 6 and remarks, “The same relationship obtains between the near-
destruction of Rome by the Gauls and its rebirth under Camillus as between Books
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City