There is much debate about Flavius’s method and purpose, and even about
whether with this terminology he was referring to an agreed method of dating;^29
his technique may have been idiosyncratic, a way of avoiding the regular dating by
the names of the consuls, with whom he had been feuding throughout his office,
and a way of linking his dedication with the most prestigious of all religious mon-
uments in the city.^30 As always, what look like dates are never just dates.
Nonetheless, as Purcell has shown, the complex of the Capitoline is central to the
consciousness of time in the middle Republic: the temple of Jupiter is acknowl-
edged as coextensive in time with the Republic itself, standing as a visible embod-
iment of the duration and durability of the Republic; the annual eponymous con-
suls are closely linked with the cult of Jupiter; nearby stands the temple of Juno
Moneta, “Remembrancer,” a center for the preservation of memory.^31 In the next
chapter we shall investigate what happens to this Republican era when the
Republic is replaced by the new Principate.
ANNIVERSARIES OF YEARS
At the beginning of the Roman historiographical tradition, as we have already seen
in chapter 3, the fall of Troy served to mark an important era. The first Latin his-
tory, that of Cato, fixed the foundation of the city by counting 432 years from the
fall of Troy rather than by using Olympiads, as his predecessors Fabius Pictor and
Cincius Alimentus had done in their Greek histories of the city.^32 Cato was capi-
talizing on, and transforming, the crucial importance of Troy in Greek time
schemes. Troy’s function in era counting helped it serve also as an anchor for
anniversaries, and we move now to this different, though related, topic.
The use of Troy in anniversary contexts has been the subject of a splendid study
by David Asheri (1983) that collects much fascinating evidence for the role of
Troy in the construction of symbolically significant anniversaries, especially mil-
lenarian anniversaries. The canonical date for the fall of Troy after Eratosthenes
came to be accepted as “1184/3 b.c.e.,” but Duris of Samos and Timaeus, both
writing before Eratosthenes, had a far earlier date, “1335/4 b.c.e.”^33 A modern
reader can look at this date and in a flash see the significance that comes from
removing the first digit — 334 is the year that Alexander the Great invaded Asia.
Duris and Timaeus reveal that this invasion occurred exactly 1,000 years after the
comrades of Alexander’s ancestor Achilles sacked the prototypical Asiatic city.
Alexander’s invasion becomes part of a chain of significance, linking the historical
present with the mythic past, and showing Greek history to be a long series of con-
- Years, Months, Days I: Eras and Anniversaries