tainly the combined calendrical and consular fastiwork as a calendar to identify
days, months, and years, and the regular association of the two kinds offastishows
that they were used for these calendrical purposes. A calendar, however, is “distinct
from a system of reckoning, which is a tool for computing the passage of time.”^28
Scholars ancient and modern have so regularly used the lists as chronographic
guides that it is easy to forget that the original purpose of the fastiwas not to facil-
itate chronological reckoning: for that purpose, further synchronization is neces-
sary.^29 As Cornell well puts it, “the important thing to remember about Roman
dates is that events were associated in the first instance with the names of the con-
suls of the year in which they took place. Locating that year in any general scheme
of chronology, whether Olympiads or years after the founding of the city, or years
before or after Christ, is a secondary and necessarily somewhat artificial process.”^30
This point is hard to assimilate because our familiarity with our own virtually ab-
solute dating system runs so deep. One finds, accordingly, statements such as the
following, which reveal an unconscious intuition that an absolute time underlies the
consular names: “Linear time at Rome was expressed through the annual magis-
tracy of the consulships of individuals from the elite. This was not the easiest sys-
tem to handle, since one needed to remember who were the two or more consuls for
any particular year.”^31 But the consuls werethe particular year; it is not as if there is
an independent year in its own sphere with the consuls in another, waiting to be
matched up. Livy and Tacitus will sometimes even put the “consuls” and the “year”
in apposition, creating a unity between the time period and its designation.^32
We must be precise and circumspect, then, in conceiving of a pair of consular
names as a “date.” The paired consulship is an office that makes orientation in time
possible when part of a series, but we should be careful about the implications of
saying that Quintus Fabius Rullianus and Publius Decius Mus equals 297 b.c.e., to
pick an example at random out of the fasti.Further, the year we are talking about
in the consular fastiis, for much of Republican history, not coextensive with the
calendar year. The year of the consuls’ office and the year of the civil and religious
cycle is not the same unit until surprisingly late in Republican history.^33 Only in 153
b.c.e.did the consuls begin taking up office on 1 January every year, synchroniz-
ing their term of office with the start of the calendrical fasti;^34 before then, back
until 222 b.c.e., they regularly took up office on 15 March, and before 222 b.c.e.
they could and did enter and leave office on any day.^35 The Republican consulate
was primarily a military office, and as long as the consuls were in post at the begin-
ning of the campaigning season, that was all that mattered. The adoption of
1 January as the start of the consular year in 153 b.c.e.is in large part due to the exi-
The Consuls’ Years. 171