Olympiad,” “748/7 b.c.e.”^153 Fabius presents what eventually became the canoni-
cal way of reconciling the old Trojan-era version and the new historical date, by
saying that the Trojans in the time of the nostoidid not found the city of Rome
directly but founded Alba Longa, of which Rome was eventually the offshoot.^154
According to Plutarch, Fabius’s main source for his early material was one Diocles
of Peparethus, and it is entirely possible that Diocles invented the whole Alban
solution to the problem of resolving the mythic and historical chronologies, and
also that he came up with the date that Fabius used.^155 We cannot be certain, but
Diocles had a list of Alban kings, which means that he had a foundation in histor-
ical times, which almost inevitably means that he had a date, an Olympiad date.
What might have been at stake for the Greek Diocles and the Greek-writing
Roman Fabius in presenting this new foundation date, even farther down-dated
than Timaeus’s? It is plausible to assume that the Roman aristocrat Fabius, at any
rate, will not have wanted to follow Timaeus in having a synchronism with the
great enemy Carthage; he may have been receptive, then, to the different — but
still unmythical — date that he found in Diocles. This newly historical date of the
first year of the eighth Olympiad brings the foundation firmly this side of the first
Olympiad, and thus into what the new programme of Eratosthenes may have
recently established as properly historical times.^156 Timaeus may have been the first
to come up with the canonical date of “776” for the beginning of the Olympic
Games, but he is very unlikely to have made a great deal of the date as the demar-
cation of history, in the way that Eratosthenes is thought by many scholars to have
done.^157 It is, then, important in itself that Timaeus’s date now looks too far back
in time after the work of Eratosthenes and has to be brought down even farther.
More surely, the very use of the Olympiad dating system is itself crucially sym-
bolic. The very fact that the foundation of Rome is now to be located within the
Panhellenic grid of the Olympiad system helps Fabius in his larger thematic plan
of showing that Rome is not a barbarian outsider but an equal participant in the
Greek cultural world of Italy, Sicily, and Greece “proper.”^158 The very fact that his
Historyis in Greek strengthens this claim to status as a cultural equal.
If we focus on this issue of Rome ’s relationship to the Greeks, we can see that
the new down-dating also changes the relationship in time between Rome and
thefirst Greek settlements in the West. Timaeus had possibly chosen his date of
“814/3” as a way of deliberately putting the Romans on a West Mediterranean
time map prior to the arrival of the Greeks, eighty years — two forty-year gener-
ations, for those who are inclined to think that way — before the foundation of his
own mother city of Syracuse.^159 The new dating of Diocles and/or Fabius, in
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City