A Question for my Classicist Friends

[steepholm]

How (if at all) did the Romans date years prior to the founding of Rome? Was there a number system equivalent to BC, or was it simply "in the time of Aeneas" or whatever?

Comments

[kalypso]

In practice, didn't they actually date years by "when X and Y were consul"? In which case they might allude to reigns of local kings. I'm not sure how many pre-Rome events they'd be able to date precisely, however.

[steepholm]

I suppose if it was important to them to have precise dates they'd probably have made them up. But if there's no dating system, perhaps precision wasn't seen as important?

[kalypso]

I don't know, though I remember discussing with my tutor the fact that they didn't seem to have thought of sorting names into alphabetical order.

I am trying to remember whether one of Marcus du Sautoy's programmes explained how the hell the Romans did arithmetic with such a cumbersome numbering system. I have a feeling he did say something about it, but have forgotten what if he did.

[steepholm]

I was vaguely wondering about negative numbers when I asked the question, though I know they didn't reach Europe until the Middle Ages or even later.

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

There weren't any Romans prior to the founding of Rome... (Not entirely facetious as an answer!)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But didn't Romans ever wish to date events that happened before the founding of their city?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not entirely facetious?

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I know they valued the history and culture of their forerunners, the Estruscans and co-opted parts of that culture (inlcuding a certain well known wolf) so this may provide a clue.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Even professional historians didn't have much call to talk about that period in much detail, but when do hear of specific dates, they generally says so many years ago before the present, for example when Cicero reports the opinion that astrology had been invented 100,000 years ago.

Contact with Greek culture, pushed "accurate" dates back to the Trojan war (early 1100s as theiy thought). Here is the relevant section form Diodorus (1.5):

As for the periods included in this work, we do not attempt to fix with any strictness the limits of those before the Trojan War, because no trustworthy chronological table covering them has come into our hands: but from the Trojan War we follow Apollodorus of Athens in setting the interval from then to the Return of the Heracleidae as eighty years, from then to the First Olympiad three hundred and twenty-eight years, reckoning the dates by the reigns of the kings of Lacedaemon, and from the First Olympiad to the beginning of the Celtic war, which we have made the end of our history, seven hundred and thirty years; so that our whole treatise of forty Books embraces eleven hundred and thirty-eight years, exclusive of the periods which embrace the events before the Trojan War.

This is how it plays out in Livy, however, with, as you see, no absolute dating at all:

It has been handed down to us, as a certain fact, that the Greeks, when they had taken Troy, treated the Trojans with the utmost severity; with the exception, however, of two of them, Æneas and Antenor, towards whom they exercised none of the rights of conquest. This lenity they owed, partly, to an old connection of hospitality, and partly, to their having been, all along, inclined to peace, and to the restoration of Helen.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you - that's really helpful. Interesting to see Diodorus relating things the First Olympiad, and hence to the Greeks' own dating system - which is in a roundabout way not unlike using BC, I suppose, but clearly less systematic.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

There was a whole discipline called Chronography (Eusebius wrote an extant treatise in it) synching up Olympiads, consulships, years since the Trojan war, Athenian Archonships, etc. And eventually the OT genealogies. This is what underlies Archbishop Usher's famous calculation of the age of the universe (which I strongly suspect is antisemeitic, since the point seems to have been to find a figure different than the one used in the Jewish calendar which dates from the creation).

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, it was only with Varro's calculations (he died in 27 BC) that 753 BC was accepted as a fixed date, and even so was not generally used until the following century. I don't think Livy bothers with dates when he is writing the early history of Rome. After all, medieval historians are often quite happy to operate without dates: it was only when Bede adopted the AD/BC dating system (the first historian to do so) in AD 731 that (some) historians started to get obsessed with days!

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

As Sellar & Yeatman remind us, there are only three memorable dates in history! :o)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that Bede was the first to mention that early heavy metal band, BC/AD.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I had had no idea, you were in any way metal prone before this date, when I read this. This has completely reversed my idea of you. At the fault of makhos, clearly. Luckily, a gal only has to appear three times in the Times in her whole lifetime. Oh, sorry, that´s: "Homes&Gardens".

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm very far from being metal prone - don't reverse your ideas too radically!

[goliard.livejournal.com]

You would think the obvious solution would be to say "so-and-so many years ante urbem conditam". Strangely enough no one seems to have thought of this (as far as I can google, anyway) before the Christian writer Orosius in the fifth century. But then, the ancients didn't believe in negative numbers, so a BC-style system might have struck them as bizarre.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, although BC seems to have been in vogue many centuries before negative numbers found their way to Europe. That was one of the maunderings that lay behind my original question.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

The thing is, most Romans hardly ever used AUC as a dating system. It's in Livy's text, but most people would date by consul years, or later, but the years of tribunician power of the emperor. Livy could have said 'x event happened so many years before Rome was founded', but he pretty much didn't. Dates are vague; the only pre-foundation of Rome date in Livy is a relative one, that Alba Longa was founded thirty years after Lavinium.