for these stories, and how he discriminated between these earlier myths and his
later material, is no longer recoverable. Did he adopt the pose of reporting “what
people say,” or did he engage in rationalizing in the manner of Dionysius of Hali-
carnassus?^149 If he had survived entire, he would certainly have provided a chal-
lenging and intriguing test case of the dialectic between myth and history.
Timaeus’s system of relations between the heroic and historical periods looks
like the right kind of place for an explanation of his down-dating of Rome. He is
fitting both Rome and Carthage into his time map of the Western Mediterranean,
and this is a Greek time map in which mythical precursors in heroic time plant
footsteps in their travels for others to follow, establishing links that their inheritors
will join up into chains between mythic and historical time when they come west
to found the Greek colonies in the eighth century.^150 The Aeneas myth already
gives him a set of mythical precursors for the Romans, but he does not want their
city to have been there continuously ever since the time of Aeneas. Rather, he
wants to have the same template for the Romans as for the Western Greeks, and
what he therefore needs is a historical follow-up, some kind of retracing or reen-
acting or refoundation in historical time.^151 And by having the historical founda-
tion date of Rome come just before the Greek colonies, he preserves a sense of the
Roman priority in the area, and also a sense of their special link with Carthage,
which is also already there before the Greek colonies. Carthage, however, is un-
anchored in mythic time, so far as we can tell from what survives of Timaeus, with
no precursors to anticipate the later historical founding. Carthage is parachuted
down into the desert with no links to a Libya of myth, whereas Rome ’s historical
beginnings as a city somehow reactivate a link to Panhellenic myth from centuries
before. Rome manages to share in the Greek template, while Carthage does not.^152
REFINING THE “HISTORICAL”
Timaeus, then, has boldly brought the foundation of the city down from the time
of Troy to within sight of the first Greek colonies in the West. This is a crucial
departure from tradition, but it is not definitive. His date does not stick. Someone
took it upon himself to say that Timaeus’s version was not good enough, and gave
instead a date within the boundary of the first Olympiad, somewhere around “750
b.c.e.,” in a way that started a trend that eventually hardened into orthodoxy. The
first concrete evidence we have is that Fabius Pictor, writing a history of Rome in
Greek sometime toward the end of the Hannibalic War, around 210 – 205 b.c.e.,
used an Olympiad date to fix the foundation in “the first year of the eighth
Refining the “Historical”. 95