Syncellus for saying that events were uncertain and undatable before the birth of
Abraham.^69
Scholars often represent the kind of continuous time map we see in the Marmor
Parium as a constant feature of the ancient world;^70 but it is a map that the histori-
ans, and even some chronographers, ostentatiously refused to navigate by.^71 Sacks
persuasively suggests that Diodorus’s scrupulosity in avoiding a chronology for
his mythic material may be a reaction precisely against the just-published Chronica
of Castor of Rhodes, with its spurious precision in dating.^72 Historians, together
with some chronographers, did not wish to envisage all past time as mapped out
with equal precision, or as stretching back in some kind of continuity; they tended
to work with a stratified past, with more or less agreed-upon marks in time that
posted an increasing security of knowledge in the tradition as one approached the
present.^73
The two key markers that recur in the Greek tradition are the Trojan War and
the first Olympiad, markers that writers in the Roman historiographical tradition
picked up and transformed creatively for their own purposes. No single text bear-
ing on this kind of stratification is canonical, but it is worth quoting here the fullest
and clearest we have surviving, from Censorinus’s report of Varro’s demarcations
of past time (DN20.12 – 21.2):^74
et si origo mundi in hominum notitiam uenisset, inde exordium sumeremus.
nunc uero id interuallum temporis tractabo quod iJstoriko;nVarro appellat.
hic enim tria discrimina temporum esse tradit, primum ab hominum principio
ad cataclysmum priorem, quod propter ignorantiam uocatur a[dhlon, secun-
dum a cataclysmo priore ad olympiadem primam, quod, quia in eo multa
fabulosa referuntur, muqiko;nnominatur, tertium a prima olympiade ad
nos, quod dicitur iJstorikovn, quia res in eo gestae ueris historiis continentur.
primum enim tempus, siue habuit initium seu semper fuit, certe quot annorum
sit non potest comprehendi.
And if the origin of the world had come into humans’ range of knowledge,
then that is where we would start from; but as it is I shall treat that interval
of time that Varro calls iJstorikovn(“historical”). For he gives three divisions
of time epochs: first from the beginning of mankind to the first flood, which
because of our ignorance of it is called a[dhlon(“unclear”), second from the
first flood to the first Olympiad, which, because many fabulous things are
reported in it, is named muqikovn(“mythical”), third from the first Olympiad
to us, which is callediJstorikovn(“historical”), because the events that hap-Dividing Up the Past. 81