Troy and Thebes because there were none to record (5.324 – 29). What happened
before those events our age cannot see, unless by process of reason (propterea quid
sit prius actum respicere aetas/nostra nequit, nisi qua ratio uestigia monstrat,5.1446 –
47). Horace, on the other hand, would have it that there were many heroes before
Agamemnon, but we do not know about them because there was no poetic tradition
to record their deeds (Carm.4.9.25 – 28). Either way, Troy is the event horizon.
The other epochal demarcation, one with even more canonical power, the
anchor for the closest approximation to a universal dating system in the ancient
world, was the first Olympiad, corresponding to “776 b.c.e.”^87 Scholars regularly
attribute the establishment of the “date” of the first Olympiad to Hippias of Elis or
to Eratosthenes, but Jacoby was almost certainly right to argue that Eratosthenes
followed in Timaeus’s footsteps, with Timaeus first establishing this date as a peg
from which historians could count in spaced intervals.^88 At least fifty years before
Eratosthenes’ ChronographiaeTimaeus had already published his Olympionicae,of
which nothing directly survives, but which must have used Olympic victors in a
chronographic scheme of synchronism.^89 Möller is right to point out that we have
no direct attestation of Timaeus using numbered Olympiads in the manner that
later became normative; but the first evidence we have of ordinal numbers for
Olympiads falls in the first half of the third century b.c.e., between Timaeus’s and
Eratosthenes’ chronographic works, and the likelihood remains that Timaeus
established the first Olympiad as a fixed point in time, together with the counting
of intervals forwards and backwards from it.^90
Nonetheless, Eratosthenes may well have made more of the first Olympiad as a
watershed than had Timaeus. Jacoby makes a strong claim that, despite beginning
his Chronographiaewith Troy, Eratosthenes established the first Olympiad as the
pivot where properly credible history began.^91 In other words, the fall of Troy may
be a demarcation from myth, but the first Olympiad is a demarcation into history.
This opens up an interesting 400-year-long grey area: if everything on the other
side of Troy is mythical, but history begins with the first Olympiad, then what is
the status of the material between these two markers — between “1184” and
“776”?^92 Eratosthenes’ own attitude to this intermediate period is quite impossible
to recover, but I think it is likely that he was presenting some kind of stratified
demarcation of historicity or knowability. Ultimately, this would be a development
of the kind of distinctions Thucydides works with in his Archaeology, where he
operates on the basis that it is possible to know the contemporary world with some
kind of precision, the preceding generation with much less certainty, and the time
before that only on the basis of hearsay and likely conjecture (1.1.3; 1.21.1). In the
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City