vital interplay between “myth” and “history” in the Roman epic tradition, especially
in Naevius and Virgil, see A. Barchiesi 1989, 133 – 38.
Frier 1999, 263.
The first history of Rome to be written in Latin was of course Ennius’s Annales.
Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom.1.74.2 = Peter, HRRel.F 17.
Feeney 1999, 16.
I have been especially influenced by the fundamental work of Miles (1986 =
(1995, chap. 2), Kraus (1994b), and Edwards (1996, 45 – 52); cf. Kraus (1998) on “good”
and “bad” repetition in Livy, building on the Virgilian work of Quint (1993, chap. 2).
There is a major discussion of the link between city-destruction and -foundation in
Serres 1991, and of the general significance of the sack of Rome by the Gauls in J. H. C.
Williams 2001, chap. 4.
This is the date as fixed by the Polybian synchronisms with the peace of
Antalcidas and Dionysius’s siege of Rhegium (1.6.2); the later conventional “Var-
ronian” chronology put the sack in a year corresponding to 390 b.c.e.: see Cornell
1995, 399 – 400. How Ennius conceived of the year of the sack in a time grid is very
uncertain.
Ennius somehow had to massage a long chronology, with only seven kings to
fill the gap between a foundation three generations after the fall of Troy and the begin-
ning of the Republic a hundred years or so before the sack of Rome by the Gauls
around 390: for an introduction to the problem, see Cornell 1986, 247. But we can be
quite sure that Ennius is not making a mistake, or failing to keep up on the latest
research; he is making conscious decisions for serious reasons.
Dreizehnter 1978. If someone wrote a novel in which a scholar called Mr.
Thirteenth wrote a book called The Rhetorical Number,they would be accused of over-
doing it. After all, “thirteen” is not just a number; it is a rhetoricalnumber.
Dreizehnter 1978, 90 – 92; cf. Syme 1958, 772; Asheri 1991 – 92, 67. Orosius
(7.2.9), in saying that Carthage lasted a little more ( paulo amplius)than seven hundred
years, and Macedonia a little less ( paulo minus),interestingly replays the language of
Ennius’s Camillus, avoiding an overly fussy precision.
On the coverage of book 4, see Skutsch 1985, 306.
My translation of the first clause attempts to capture the way in which “the res
is in the first instance the historian’s subject-matter but it then ‘slides’ into being the
Roman state itself ” (Moles 1993a, 146). On the prominence of allusion to Ennius in
Livy’s preface, see Moles 1993a, 142, 155, 157.
Chaplin 2000, 200 – 201, with her reference to Fornara 1983, 73; cf. Miles 1995,
77–79.
In accordance with the crucial themes of repetition and refoundation, this is
actually Camillus’s second speech on this theme: his first (much shorter, and in oratio
obliqua) occurs earlier in book 5, just after the capture of Veii (5.30. 1 – 3).
notes to pages 99 – 101