“748/7,” locates Rome only a dozen years before the first Sicilian colonies, and,
tantalizingly, right at the very beginning of the Greek colonization movement in
Italy.^160
Now, the data here are very hard to work with, because the crucial question is
obviously not when as a matter of fact do we now think the Greek colonies were
founded in Italy and Sicily, but when might historians in the late third century have
thought (or been able plausibly to assert) they were founded. The ancient tradi-
tions about these dates are all over the map, and the data in Eusebius, for example,
make no distinction whatever between the first Greek colonies in Italy and the
Ionian settlements, which modern scholars date to three hundred years earlier.^161
Eusebius lumps together in the eleventh century b.c.e.a cluster of Greek colonies
in Ionia and in the West, along with Punic colonies.^162 The tradition on the Sicilian
colonies tends to be fuller and more uniform than on the Italian ones, and
Eusebius’s eighth-century dates on the first Sicilian colonies closely track those
given by Thucydides.^163 The Roman tradition on these Sicilian colony dates is a
Sicilian one, surely mediated to them by Timaeus, who had them from Antiochus,
the source for Thucydides in book 6.^164
It is harder to know about the Italian dates in this tradition, since the data for the
Italian colony foundation dates are much more sparse. If the Athenians had
attacked Taras/Tarentum instead of Syracuse in 415 b.c.e., then we would know a
lot more than we do about the tradition concerning the Greek colonies in Italy,
since Thucydides’ book 6 would have opened with a survey of what Antiochus had
to say about the colonies of Magna Graecia. We know, however, that Antiochus
wrote on Italy as well as on Sicily, and one of his Italian colony foundation dates
survives, namely, that for Croton: Antiochus said that Croton was founded in the
same year as Syracuse, that is, “733.”^165 Our source, Strabo, says that Croton was
founded after Sybaris, so that Sybaris is sometime before “733” in this tradition.
Strabo also says that Cumae is the oldest of the Italian or Sicilian colonies,
although he gives no date.^166 In other words, Croton dates to “733,” Sybaris is
older than that, and Cumae is older than that again. It is very likely, then, that this
tradition had a foundation date for Cumae, the first Greek colony in the West, in
the high “740s.” I cannot produce an exact synchronism, but if I had to back one
Greek colony as a synchronistic hook for Diocles and/or Fabius in their dating of
Rome ’s foundation to “748/7,” I would back Cumae, the very first Greek colony
in the West. It would be no accident, accordingly, that Virgil’s Aeneas should make
his first landfall in Italy at Cumae, and that he should do so, as Barchiesi puts it, “in
the guise of a Greek settler looking for a colonization oracle.”^167
Refining the “Historical”. 97