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R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

accomplished was to provide a brief, dated timeline of Rome’s history in which one
could find particular events and determine relative chronologies in a way that had
never been possible before. In parallel to this Latinized Greek tradition of Nepos and
Atticus, a native Latin tradition that we call consularia developed as well.
From the end of the regal period, two annually elected consuls had given their
name to the Roman year and so, as in the Ancient Near East, lists of annual eponyms
had to be produced to keep track of the passage of years. These consular fasti were
just lists of paired names, but as in Greece and the Near East, the simple expedi-
ent of noting events that took place under the eponyms was a natural development,
both mnemonically and practically useful, at least for short stretches of recent history.
These annotated fasti are what historians call consularia, and they had a long life in
Roman antiquity. Large, monumental fasti were often compiled for ideological and
antiquarian reasons, and we find inscribed fasti and consularia in great public spaces,
particularly during the transformative generation that ushered in the Principate, under
Augustus and Tiberius. The most important of the inscribed fasti are the Fasti Cap-
itolini, now housed in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, but inscribed around 18 BC
for display on the triumphal arch commemorating Augustus’Parthian victory. Not just
a list of eponyms, the Fasti Capitolini also include a smattering of historical entries
noting the beginning of important past wars and are, in effect, proto-consularia. Fully
twenty-three other epigraphic fasti and five inscribed consularia are now known, most
clustering around the reign of Augustus, although the Fasti Ostienses was continued
down to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The inscribed fasti and consularia of the Augus-
tan period were part of exactly the same tradition as the literary consularia transmitted
to us from late antiquity. The only difference is the medium of display, not the genre.17
It was then, in late antiquity, that the Greek and Latin traditions of chronicling and
consularia came to intersect, through the works of Eusebius of Caesarea and St Jerome.
That statement might seem surprising to some readers, for despite the observ-
ably continuous tradition of chronicling from Near Eastern antiquity to the Classical
world, there remains a persistent belief that the late antique and medieval chronicle
is basically Christian in origin. Unfortunately, this belief is simply wrong.18 The histo-
riographical importance of the Christian bishop Eusebius cannot be overstated, but
neither he nor any other Christian author invented the chronicle. Rather, the special
genius of Eusebius was to combine the chronographical precision of the Hellenistic
Olympiad chronicle with another strand of Hellenistic historiography: chronogra-
phy as a tool of historical apologetics. Historical or cultural apologetics is a common
Hellenistic phenomenon, not merely a Christian one. In the multi-cultural world cre-
ated by Alexander’s conquests, proving the value of one’s own native traditions took
on new significance. Because the ancient world regarded anything old as good, and
anything new as ipso facto less good or bad, the antiquity of a culture was the measure
of its worth. Proud representatives of ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Phoenician and
17 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 137-61.
18 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 1-8.