Whatever the force of such speculation about a precise synchronism with a par-
ticular Greek colony, the crucial point remains that Rome now has a foundation
date that can make it plausible to see Rome as part of real — that is, Greek —
history, so as to defend it against the kind of aspersions that someone like Apollo-
dorus might want to throw at it.^168 The very use of an Olympiad date furthers this
design,^169 as would the time links with the Greek colonies in the West. These links
would present Rome as not just a historical foundation but as a civilized polisfrom
the start of civilization in Italy. Synchronisms are always more than simple dates,
and this synchronism, contrived during the Hannibalic War, would say, “We
Romans are partners in civilization with you Greeks against Carthage; we Romans
and you Greeks were founding civilization in Italy at the same time, unlike those
barbarians the Samnites and the Opici, who inhabit a timeless zone, an
‘allochrony’^170 — and unlike those barbarians the Carthaginians, who remain stuck
out on a time limb, stuck where Timaeus put them, in the age before Western civ-
ilization.”^171 This tactic would be, as it were, an “out-modernizing,” the reverse of
the “out-pasting” of Zerubavel (2003). Instead of trying to annex venerability by
claiming the most extended past possible and pushing the origins farther back in
time than the competition’s, the claim of a properly historical origin would be
trumping the competition in terms of civilization and modernity.
Here we see the real power of the way of thinking of these synchronistic proj-
ects within a model of comparison. The greatest work done on the subject of com-
parison is by Jonathan Z. Smith, who observes that “xresembles y” really means
“xresembles ymore than zwith respect to.. .” or “xresembles ymore than w
resembles zwith respect to.. .”^172 Diocles and/or Fabius, then, could be seen as
claiming not simply that “Rome resembles Greece,” but that “Rome resembles
Greece more than the other Italians and more than Carthage with respect to civi-
lization.” The late third century is a good context for such representations. The
aftermath of the conquest of Sicily, and the threat that Hannibal posed to the nexus
of alliances in Magna Graecia, will have been a good time for West Greeks and
Romans to synchronize their colonial pasts, on the basis of similar stories of his-
torical foundations picking up the traces of mythical pasts.^173 The developed
Fabian story of the foundation of Rome is, after all, a colony story, with all the
usual trappings — apparently humble origins of founder, rape, foundational act of
murder.^174 It is highly significant that all the versions that have a “historical” date
“make Rome a colony of Alba Longa.”^175
The new Fabian version of a historical foundation picking up traces from the
time of myth via the metropolis of Alba Longa did not become orthodoxy imme-
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City