pened in it are contained in true histories. For the first epoch of time, whether
it had a beginning or whether it always existed, it is certainly not possible to
comprehend its number of years.We shall examine the Trojan War in the next chapter, for it is of crucial signifi-
cance in the poetic traditions as a huge break in the relations between gods and
mortals, a profound rupture after which there is no more mingling of human and
divine. But in the historiographical and chronological traditions as well there is a
tendency to locate a strong marker here, fixing the Trojan War as pivotal or tran-
sitional, with myth lying on the other side of it.^75 Even the Marmor Parium, which
can tell you when Demeter or Poseidon visited Athens, and which in general has
no investment in demarcating between mythical and historical time, has a signifi-
cant feature in its layout when it comes to the Trojan War. There are only two
places in the whole tablet that are marked with punctuation, a gap of a few letter
spaces: the first is immediately after the prefatory material, and the other is imme-
diately before the Trojan War, as if to bracket offthat entire section.^76 Eratosthenes
began his chronographical work with Troy’s fall, implying that the mythical
period before Troy was beyond chronology.^77 This decision would parallel his
refusal, when wearing his geographer’s hat, to put any store by the information
about Mediterranean geography that was supposedly preserved in Homer: “You’d
find where Odysseus wandered,” he said, “when you found the cobbler who
stitched together the bag of winds” (as reported by Strabo, 1.2.15). It was Eratos-
thenes who fixed the fall of Troy in “1184/3 b.c.e.,” and this was the date that
became dominant in the tradition.^78 One of the main reasons that the Trojan War
is so important in the chronological canon is that it is “the first conflict between the
continents”;^79 as we have seen, synchronistic chronology is inextricable from the
theme oftranslatio imperii,and the fall of Troy inaugurates this theme for the clas-
sical period and, even more significantly, for the epoch of Alexander. Apollo-
dorus’s book divisions show what is at issue. His Chronicawas in four books, with
book 1 going from the fall of Troy (the same starting point as Eratosthenes) to the
Persian Wars, and book 2 going from there to the death of Alexander.^80
In the Roman tradition the fall of Troy is likewise of the highest importance,
with the added reason that the fall of Troy provides the impetus for the beginning
of Rome. Livy’s history of Rome begins, after the preface, with the aftermath of
the fall of Troy, and the language with which he picks up the narrative at this point
signals the primacy of the moment: Iam primum omnium satis constat Troia capta
(“First of all it is generally agreed that when Troy was captured,” 1.1.1). Varro
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City