Page:Chronologies and calendars (IA chronologiescale00macdrich).pdf/25



HE calendar by Julius Caesar, and the corrections thereon by Pope Gregory three hundred and fourteen years ago, are the two points of chronological light which gleam through the darkness of the Middle Ages, to guide the historian of the nineteenth century. 'The history of Rome was for centuries the history of the civilized world; and even after it ceased to be the capital of the empire, it was the centre of Christendom, and the most interesting and influential city on the planet.' The city of Rome was, according to the usual tradition, founded in the year 753 B.C. Original myths and accruing inferences have supplied dates to 'presumed historical events,' as Dr. Merivale remarks. At another place the same authority says that it was the writings of the Greeks upon Rome which first aroused the emulation of the Roman annalists, to begin in the 6th century of the city to construct, but also in the Greek tongue, a history of Rome. Other authorities, appalled at the amount of fiction which was beclouding the first centuries of the city, tried 'to construct an entirely new theory of Roman history, which, as Ortolan remarks, has the singular merit of having been wholly unknown to the Romans themselves.' Numa