made the fall of Troy a crucial watershed within his “mythical” period, “as the last
of a series of events staggered at 400-year intervals between Ogygus’ flood and the
first Olympiad”; the fall of Troy closed offthe second book of his De Gente Populi
Romani.^81 Jerome ’s Chroniclerepresents the fall of Troy as being, in a sense, the
beginning of Roman history. When he supplements Eusebius’s Chronicleand trans-
lates it into Latin, he says that he will add more Roman material to it;^82 he trans-
lates straight from the Greek down as far as the fall of Troy, and that is where he
starts adding the material that he has described as Roman.^83 The layout of the page
devoted to the fall of Troy vividly symbolizes the status of the event as an epoch-
making watershed, for “Troia Capta” spreads over the whole of the double
page — no other event takes up a double spread in this way. The pivotal chrono-
logical significance of the Trojan War is clear from the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid,
which depends upon the idea that the Trojan War is a gigantic hinge between myth
and history. Virgil shows Juno as driven by one mythical and one historical moti-
vation, with her hatred of the Trojans reaching back into mythical, Homeric, time,
and her partisanship for Carthage reaching forward into historical time.^84 As it
progresses, Virgil’s epic puts these apparently perspicuous categories under a lot of
strain: a radical contamination of the categories of history and myth is one of the
things the Aeneidis interested in, not least because the poet and his audience are
now living in a new age of demigods and miracles, and, in a sense, returning to an
age of myth. Aeneas was the last of the old demigods, and now Julius Caesar and
Augustus are the first of a new breed.^85
In Lucretius and Horace, in rather different ways, Troy is a crucial demarcation
line for what may be known as human history. When Lucretius is arguing that time
is not a per seexistent, but the product of the interaction of body and space (1.459 –
63), he immediately turns to the related problem of whether historical events are per
seexistents or not (1.464 – 77). His illustrative examples come from the beginning
and the end of the Trojan War (Paris and Helen, the wooden horse), and it is no
accident that Troy should provide the nucleus around which cluster questions of the
status of time and history, for Troy is the farthest back one can go in order to find
examples of human beings doing verifiable things. Time does not exist in itself, nor
do past historical events exist in themselves: both are accidents of body and space,
which are the only real per seentities. The body and space existed and still exist that
gave rise to the accidents we call “the time in which the Trojan war happened” and
“the events of the Trojan War.”^86 Beyond that point it is not possible to go. Lucretius
believes that our knowledge gives out at Troy because the world is comparatively
new. The earliest poetic tradition does not preserve “deeds of men” from before
Dividing Up the Past. 83