A Little Noticed Synchronism in Livy and the Working Methods of the Annalists

✍ Scribed by Holloway, R. Ross

• Book ID: 111981258
• Publisher: Akademie Verlag
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: German
• Weight: 80 KB
• Volume: 94
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0075-6334
• DOI: 10.1524/klio.2012.0007

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Livy (IV, 29, 8) rejects a synchronism found in his sources which referred events of his Varronian year 431 to 409 (the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily in that year). This crux illustrates the degree to which personalities and events of the Early Roman Republic floated without secure chronological foundations. In actuality the history of the first 140 years of the Republic, as we find it in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus to the extent his work is preserved, represents an artificial structure of decades based on prominent events spaced at ten year intervals.