ern investigators alike. The foundation of the city generated for the ancients an
important cluster of questions about what counts as history, questions that still
exercise historians of the early period of Rome. How can historical time be defined
and mapped out? What can and cannot be plotted in historical time? What is at
stake in claiming that a particular event is part of historical time or not? How does
the historian define the limits of historical knowledge? And how does the historian
cope at the limits of historical knowledge? Further, we shall consider the problem
of whether the transition from myth to history can be definitive: the founding of
the city may look like a once-and-for-all event, but the movement of history can
eddy backwards to the foundational moment, making refoundation necessary,
again and again, threatening to breach once more the divide between myth and
history. The next chapter in this pairing will examine a rather different way of con-
ceiving of this transition from myth to history, with the myth of the Gold and Iron
ages. Here we shall be concentrating more on the poetic tradition, and especially
on the very moment of demarcation between the Ages of Gold and Iron, to see
how the passage from myth to history warps the net of time that covers the transi-
tion. Once again, the problem of a return will engage us, with the possibility of a
return to the Golden Age providing a powerful magnet at many periods.
It is a diverting, though demoralizing, exercise to type in the keywords “myth
and history” in a library catalogue search. Even in studies of Greece and Rome
there is an overwhelming body of material to deal with, and it would be very easy
to get totally bogged down in the swamps ofspatium historicumand spatium
mythicum,ofillud tempusand “temps des dieux, temps des hommes” — to mention
only the most imposing of the phrases that have been coined by students of this
problem. It looks in fact as if the pendulum is swinging, in the way it does; perhaps
partly in reaction to the vacuity and portentousness of much of the discussion,
more and more scholars nowadays are inclined to deny that there is much value in
the language of “mythical time” and “historical time,” holding that these distinc-
tions are not current in the ancient world.^1 I would like to push back on the pen-
dulum before it gathers too much momentum, but I do not want to make it swing
back all the way. The received wisdom on the dichotomy certainly deserves to be
questioned, but both its proponents and opponents have tended to run together
issues that ought to be kept distinct. I shall argue that the activity of demarcating
between myth and history mattered in the ancient historiographical tradition,
though not necessarily in ways that might correspond closely to any of our current
modern divisions between myth and history;^2 and I shall argue that the chrono-
logical dimension to this demarcation between myth and history is one that is
The Myth/History Event Horizon. 69