Augustus’s Consular Years. 175
in play on this document: one unit depends for its meaning on the date of founda-
tion, the other on the principle of eponymity.
The most telling innovation introduced by the foundation-era notation is that it
generates a clash between two concepts of civil time. One has it that the real time
of Rome begins with the foundation of the city; the other has it that the real time
of Rome begins with the foundation of the Republic.^46 The traditional consular
lists chart the time of the city from the foundation of the Republic, implying that
the time before the consular lists is somehow out of the reckoning, just as tradi-
tional annalistic history has no era system for the time of the kings, and begins real,
properly structured temporal history with the beginning of the Republic.^47 By put-
ting a foundation-era count beside the consuls’ names, Augustus subverts this
understanding; in being aligned with the counting from the foundation of the city,
the list of names loses a large part of its significance as a chart of Republican time.^48
“There was,” as Purcell has recently reminded us, “a structural association be-
Figure8.
The Capitoline Fasti for the years 173 – 154 b.c.e., a transcript of the text in figure 7.
Degrassi 1947, 51.