If you went to Rome in 300 b.c.e., in other words, they had some way of telling
you how long ago the kings were expelled and the Republic established,^120 but I
very much doubt that they had any measured way of telling you when the city was
founded. It is, then, virtually certain that the Romans themselves at this time had
no foundation date for the city of Rome, not least because around 300 b.c.e.the
Greeks did not yet have one — the foundations in the time of the nostoiare not dat-
able events. When the historical foundation dates did come into play, as we shall
see shortly, they were based on calculations from the fall of Troy, and no one in
Rome in 300 b.c.e.could have given you a date for the fall of Troy that did not
come out of a Greek book.
It seems to be taken for granted that the Romans had an idea of how long the
kings had reigned, and that all they had to do was add this figure to the year of the
expulsion of the kings in order to go back in time to the foundation.^121 It seems to
me much more likely that they originally had no coherent story about how long
they had been ruled by kings, and that they only started to work on this issue once
a tradition of historiography had started to develop in the city and they had to
come up with a continuous historical-looking narrative from the foundation on-
wards. As De Cazanove points out in an important discussion, it is highly signifi-
cant that the first historical foundation dates vary widely and presuppose, accord-
ingly, widely differing lengths for the regal period;^122 the eventually canonical time
frame for the kings of between 240 and 244 years is not a given in the tradition
from the start but a “fact” that had to be worked out in relation to other signposts
and that took a good while to pin down in orthodoxy. The span of the monarchy is
the result of counting forward from a fall of Troy date rather than backward from
a beginning of Republic date: “The length of the regal period was deduced from
the date assigned to the foundation, and not the other way around.”^123 They did not
figure out when the city was founded by counting back from the foundation of the
Republic the number of years the kings had reigned; they figured out how many
years the kings had reigned by counting forward from an independent Trojan-
derived city foundation date to the foundation of the Republic. Walbank sums up
well: “If in fact the foundation was fixed by calculations based on the fall of Troy,
and the foundation of the republic by the fasti,discrepancies would naturally arise,
which could be adjusted only by changing the number of regnal years.”^124
None of this argument is meant to imply that the Romans did not have their own
indigenous foundation story. I am not claiming, as others have done, that the story
of Romulus and Remus was made up by a Greek and that the Romans took it over
from them.^125 For what it is worth, I am sure the Romans had been telling the story
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City