beginning of Rome, since the Trojan War, according to Cato’s way of doing
things, is an event in universal, or Roman, history, not Greek, an origoin a pro-
founder sense than simply marking the start of ascertainable history.^187 From now
on, the Roman historians will use indigenous time frames, which we shall investi-
gate in chapter 6.
REFOUNDING THE CITY:
ENNIUS, LIVY, AND VIRGIL
The city of Rome has now been successfully founded in historical time — whether
that time is focalized as Greek or Roman — but we have not yet reached the end of
the story. As everyone knows, the city of Rome kept having to be re-founded, and
the patterns of refoundation drastically reconfigure the trajectory of movement
from myth to history that we have been following so far.^188
Ennius’s most explicit surviving allusion to the date of the foundation of the city
in fact comes at the moment when the city had just been virtually destroyed, and
was on the verge of vanishing from history, after the sack by the Gauls in 387/6
b.c.e.^189 The context is a speech in which Camillus persuades the Senate not to
move to Veii, but to refound the city instead (154 – 55 Skutsch):
Septingenti sunt paulo plus aut minus anni
augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est.
It is seven hundred years, a little more or a little less,
since famous Rome was founded by august augury.How this seven-hundred-year period between Romulus’s foundation and the sack
of Rome by the Gauls actually worked remains a mystery, at least to me.^190 Still, we
should not overlook the symbolic significance of this number in its own right. The
importance of the seven-hundred-year period has been very well illustrated in the
fascinating book Die rhetorische Zahl,written by a scholar with the gloriously apt
name of Dreizehnter.^191 Dreizehnter does not mention this passage of Ennius, but
he collects a great deal of interesting material about seven hundred years as the life
span of a city or an empire from foundation to extinction, or from foundation to
virtual extinction or only just-escaped extinction. In various traditions that he
examines there were seven hundred years from the foundation to the destruction
of Melos, Carthage, and Macedonia, or from the foundation to the virtual extinc-
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City