major Roman time machine, for it almost certainly housed, and almost certainly
for the first time, both kinds of Roman Fasti, a list of consuls and a set of calendri-
cal fasti.In addition, the temple of Hercules Musarum provided for the first time a
physical home in Rome for the Greek Muses. The city had not had a cult of the
Muses before, but the new temple housed the statues of the Muses that were looted
from the city of Ambracia, the old capital of Rome ’s first overseas enemy, King
Pyrrhus. These Muses were very much Pyrrhus’s Muses, for the statues had been
in Pyrrhus’s old palace.^41 The Muses now have a physical home in Rome, just as
Ennius’s Annalesprovide them for the first time with a poetic home in Rome; this
massive piece of ring composition carries us back to the beginning of the poem,
which opened with the word Musae,as the first Roman poet to invoke the Greek
Muses began his unprecedented task.^42 The fall of Ambracia, commemorated in
the triumph of 187 and the temple of(ex hypothesi)184, “must have seemed a cul-
minating point in history.”^43
Ennius’s fifteen books, then, will have contained a thousand-year span of
Roman history, from apparent total destruction by the Greeks to military and cul-
tural triumph over the Greeks. And this significant span of Roman time is being
constructed using a millenarian calculation from the fall of Troy of the kind that
had originally been constructed by Greeks, to demonstrate Greek triumphalism
over Asia. Now, however, the tables are turned, and the thousand-year span is
being used to demonstrate Roman triumphalism over Greece as the Romans rise
from the ashes of Troy. Ennius’s Hellenistic cultural inheritance is the ideal envi-
ronment to locate this kind of searching out of significant patterns of reciprocity
and reversal in history, structured around symbolic numbers.^44 If the Alexander
cult claimed that the descendant of Achilles had finally laid the Asiatic threat to rest
after a thousand years, then Ennius claims that the descendants of the defeated
Asiatics have looped back to conquer the homeland of another descendant of
Achilles, the would-be Alexander, Pyrrhus.
Millenarian numbers continued to exercise their fascination, with Troy’s fall
regularly being superseded by the foundation of the city as the epoch for calcula-
tion. In the third century c.e.the historian Asinius Quadratus found it opportune
to place the foundation of the city in “776 b.c.e.,” partly so that he could have a
thousand-year span of time from then down to his own time: his history was enti-
tled ïRwmaikh; Ciliethriv", “Rome ’s Thousand Years.”^45 Not very long after
Asinius Quadratus, Philip the Arab staged celebratory games in 248 c.e.to fall on
the 1,000th anniversary of the foundation of the city, using the foundation date of
“753 b.c.e.”^46 The appeal of ten units of one hundred years was strong, and Chris-
- Years, Months, Days I: Eras and Anniversaries