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Homework Help: Social Studies: World History: Ancient Rome
by Emily McPherson
The three-hundred-and-thirty-three year period that Vergil figures between the arrival of Aeneas to Italy and Romulus' founding of Rome is the result of a tradition of grappling with a basic problem in chronology of a legend that attributes to Aeneas the Origins of Rome. The problem stems from the incongruity of the date of the end of the Trojan war with that of the founding of Rome, an inconsistency that would make it impossible have a refugee from Troy found Rome. This problem is not addressed in the early Greek accounts that have Rome founded by Aeneas, Odysseus. These accounts take little notice of the native legends of Rome that would have made the problem of date inescapable, but develop out of a desire of Greeks in Magna Graeca to comprehend the legendary history of the Italy in relation to the Greek mythology that is familiar to them. One of the most often cited of these Greek stories is that of Hellanikos (fifth c. B.C.) preserved in the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.72.2). The story has Odysseus and Aeneas found Rome, which they name after one of the Trojan women, Rhome. How the two notorious enemies reconcile their differences is not stated in the fragment that survives.
In the end of the fourth century Rome begins to assert her dominance in Italy, and the rise in power gains the attention of the Greek world. A result of this is that the Greek historians and mythographers begin to take account of local traditions at Rome in formulating accounts of her origins. In the third century the Sicilian historian Timaeus, the first whose fragments betray an intimate acquaintance with the customs at Rome, places the date for the foundation of the city at 814/813 B.C. (Jacoby, FGH 566 F 60). In another fragment Timaeus places the Trojan war at the beginning of the twelfth c. B.C., thus acknowledging at least implicitly a gap of around three-hundred years that must be accounted for by those who would have Aeneas or any other veteran of the Trojan war responsible for the founding of Rome. The gap is explicitly recognized by Fabius Pictor, the third c. B.C. Roman Historian, who set the date for the foundation of Rome by Romulus at 748/47, a date "much later" than Aeneas' arrival to Italy. The fragmentary quality of Fabius' surviving work makes it impossible to determine how much of the account of the period that intervenes between Aeneas and the twins that Vergil presents in the Aeneid is already articulated in Fabius. However, The names of two of the Alban kings, Numitor and Amulius, are preserved in one of the fragments (fr. 5ab; see N. Horsfall, Roman myth and Mythography 1987, 22 n. 29), and this at least suggests that as early as the third c. B.C. the legend of the Alban kings as the intervening stage between Aeneas and Romulus and Remus had begun to develop. The gap is acknowledged by Cato, who places the founding of Rome 432 after the Trojan War (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.73.4), and included the account of Alban kings, as does Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his prose history of Rome composed contemporarily with the Aeneid.
It should be noted, that the legend of Aeneas in Italy was flexible, and it was by no means mandatory to include the Alban kings or give any attention at all to the chronological problems of a Trojan foundation of Rome. Striking evidence of this is that Naevius and Ennius make Romulus a grandson of Aeneas, and thus transport the founding of Rome back into the eleventh c. B.C.
Homework Help: Social Studies: World History
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