the foundation of the city, but their motive in each case is always something more
than just providing a date, and they do not deploy this phraseology as part of an
agreed system for chronographic organization. Livy uses this language in a sym-
bolic fashion to create a sense of significant demarcation posts in the trajectory of
the city’s fate, with the Gallic sack coming 365 years after the foundation (5.54.5);
or else he marks crucial constitutional innovations in this way, as if to chart the
developmental phases in the life of the city, telling us that the Decemvirate was
instituted 302 years (3.33.1) or the consular tribunes 310 years after the foundation
of the city (4.7.1).^19 Here he is following the early Latin annalists, who likewise
marked vital staging posts in the city’s history in this way.^20 Cassius Hemina
identifies the religious recuperation after the Gallic sack as taking place in the
363rd year from the foundation of the city,^21 while the first Greek doctor arrived in
the 535th;^22 Calpurnius Piso noted the beginning of Rome ’s seventh saeculumin the
600th year.^23 Modern observers can scarcely help feeling that it would have been
highly useful to employ A.U.C. as a dating mechanism, since it so closely resem-
bles our own era dating, and when we see such a reference in Livy many will
inevitably, but erroneously, take him to be supplying a date.^24 These apparent era
dates are not, however, part of an understood dating system that exists independ-
ently outside the text, but rather symbolic exploitations of the pervasive interval-
based chronographic systems we discussed in chapter 1.^25 As we shall see in the
next chapter, the real temporal backbone for Roman historiography is not any era
system, but the list of consuls, the Fasti Consulares.
A more likely candidate for a Roman era is the year of the simultaneous expul-
sion of the kings, foundation of the Republic, and dedication of Tarquin’s long-
planned Capitoline temple of Jupiter, a year regularly used as a time reference by
writers in the late Republic.^26 Especially if there is a grounding to the tenacious
story about the consuls banging a nail into the doorposts of the temple of Jupiter
Optimus Maximus on the Ides of September every year, then the tradition that the
Republic is coextensive in time with the temple will have corroborated the power
of this foundational era.^27 The first attested date from a Roman source refers to this
era, as Purcell (2003) has recently reminded us in the course of a fine evocation of
the time machine embodied in the Capitoline hill in the mid-Republic. As we have
already seen in chapter 3, the aedile Cn. Flavius dedicated a sanctuary of Con-
cordia at the base of the Capitoline at the end of his turbulent term of office, in the
year we call 304 b.c.e., and the sanctuary bore an inscription testifying that it had
been dedicated in the 204th year post Capitolinam aedem dedicatam,“the 204th
year after the dedication of the Capitoline temple [of Jupiter]” (Pliny HN33.19).^28
Eras. 141