before the foundation date for Rome that every schoolboy used to know, 753 — or,
if you prefer, 751 or 748, but at any rate, somewhere in the middle of the eighth
century, many generations after the fall of Troy. Only in the late third century
b.c.e.did writers begin to home in on this newly canonical time zone for the city’s
foundation. As we have just seen in our discussion of Eratosthenes, a date some-
time around “750” would have been recognizable as “historical” in the late third
century. Many scholars have commented on this connection, remarking that it
must have been very attractive to envisage the foundation of the city as falling just
this side of “history,” just this side of the first Olympiad.^103 The beginning of the
city is thereby linked, though not with exact precision, to the beginning of history.
We have to wait a long time until we meet a historian who goes all the way and says
that Rome was actually founded in “776,” to make the equation fit perfectly. This
is Asinius Quadratus, writing in the third century c.e.; he composed a work in
Greek tracing the history of the city for 1,000 years from the foundation in the first
Olympiad up to his own time.^104
Apart from being overly Grecizing, Asinius Quadratus was making it all too
obviously trim and symmetrical.^105 Authors preferred to capitalize on the fact that
the city’s canonical foundation epoch was just inside where history began, because
this made the historicity of the events surrounding the foundation the topic of
fruitful debate.^106 Both Cicero and Livy are able to associate their narratives of
Romulus with the hoary glamor of the fabulaeof his divine parentage, while main-
taining a nuanced distance from a pose of credulous assent.^107 In the case of Livy,
this tactic is closely bound up with his subtle generic demarcations, as he creates a
distinction between his own work and the mingling of divine and human to be
found in poetic epic (Pref.6 – 7). He deftly tilts the balance of credibility against
the idea that Mars really was the twins’ parent (1.4.2), while still allowing the story
its place at the head of the Roman story, where it is inextricably part of the mind
game of dominance that the Romans play over their imperial subjects (Pref.7).^108
Here one is reminded that in Roman culture myth often comes already marked as
“Greek,” so that a new beginning of Roman history may be felt to demand a
demarcation from fabulae,with belief in such things remaining the characteristic
of the Greek inhabitants of Rome ’s empire. In the De Republica,Cicero’s speaker,
Scipio, is prepared to go farther down the road of assent to the divinity of Romu-
lus, stressing in the process that Roman society at the time of Romulus’s death and
apotheosis was not rudely backward but in the full light of history (2.18 – 19).
Romulus is a good example of the value of the soccer offside analogy, for his
case reveals the way that “776” or “753” are not rigid boundaries but mobile mark-
The Foundation of Rome: Myth or History?. 87