1 and 2, the end of monarchy and the start of the republic.... Both the start of the
republic and the origoin 390 in turn look back to the original foundation, estab-
lishing a historical continuity even across such cataclysmic events as the birth of
libertasand the near-death of Rome.”^216 The fall of Troy, the foundation of the city
by Romulus, the foundation of the Republic by Brutus, the refoundation of the city
by Camillus — such are the great staging posts picked out by Livy’s narrative as it
heads toward the now lost end point of Augustus’s attempt to negotiate the Roman
state ’s latest transition, from the Republic established by Brutus to a nouus status.^217
Tacitus makes a great deal of these demarcation points. He brings a number of
the key periodizations into play with the first sentence of the Annales,mentioning
the foundation of the city and of the Republic: Urbem Romam a principio reges
habuere: libertatem et consulatum L. Brutus instituit(“The city of Romewas heldfrom
the beginning by kings: liberty and the consulate were instituted by L. Brutus”).
Here he is alluding to, quoting, and correcting Sallust, who had defied long-stand-
ing orthodoxy by moving the foundation of Rome back into the heroic age: Urbem
Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani(“The city of Rome,
according to my sources, was founded and heldfrom the start by Trojans,” Cat.
6.1). According to Tacitus, then, real Roman history, proper constitutional history,
begins not with the Trojans but with the historical foundation and the rule of the
kings, and another watershed in history comes with the crucial chronographical
marker of the expulsion of the kings.^218 This move from “Trojan” or “monarchi-
cal” myth to “Roman” history does not work, however, as Rome ’s history
becomes circular: despite Tacitus’s efforts, Roman history goes back into the
realms of myth. With the monarchy of Nero, the last of the Aeneadae, as Dio
Cassius calls him (62.18.3 – 4), Roman history reverts to the Trojan fairy stories
peddled by the Julii.^219 On Nero’s first appearance in the Annales,when he is nine
years old, stories are being told about snakes looking over him as a baby, “the stuff
of fables, modeled on foreign marvels” (fabulosa et externis miraculis adsimilata);
Nero himself said there was only one (11.11.3). In his first public speech, delivered
at the age of sixteen, before his accession, Nero spoke on behalf of the people of
Ilium, speaking eloquently “on the Roman descent from Troy and Aeneas the
founder of the Julian stock and other things close to fable” (Romanum Troia demis-
sum et Iuliae stirpis auctorem Aenean aliaque haud procul fabulis,12.58.1).
Roman categories of time are distorted by Nero along with everything else that
is Roman, as we shall see in chapter 6; when it comes to the temporal distinctions
between myth and history that the Roman tradition had been working on so hard
for centuries, Tacitus shows that Nero blurs and subverts them too. Nowhere is
Republic and Empire. 105