Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/91

 On the Dating of Ancient History. 81 practice if it was one, of dating, at that time, from so important a recent event as the reorganization of the city as a colony, is natural enough, and proves nothing as to any old Italian custom. At the time of this in- scription, Greece had long been conquered, and Syria was rapidly being so : the Eastern custom of city-dating was very likely by this time be- coming fashionable in Italy. On Scaliger's Ravenna inscription of the time of Justinian, (when Ra- venna, as every one knows, was a Greek dependency and a Greek city,) we need not observe, except that it is wonderful what he can have thought it would prove about early customs of Italy. The remaining one is a stone at Interamna, and is, he considers, a congratulatory inscription to Tiberius on the death of Sejanus : it bears the date " anno post Interam- nam conditam 704." There is nothing wonderful or un-Italian in a petty municipality, now that the epoch of Rome was a recognized fact, pom- pously imitating it, in an honorary and show inscription, with one of their own : and till we have more instances of the practice, that is what I should think this must be believed to be : any how it proves Scaliger nothing as to the early Italian practice which the Romans were so ashamed of neglecting. Niebuhr repeats Scaliger's general assertion, slightly diluted, appa- rently as his own independent opinion : " Eras of cities from their foundation were common in Italy : * and then he mentions, referring to Scaliger, in the text the Interamna inscription, and in the note the Puteoli one, this latter in a way which suggests to one that it is an exception, or something peculiar, different from the common rule, and suggests to one therefore also that there is a common rule for it to be different from : it is a curious case of exceptio probat regulam, or the giving an idea of a general practice by indicating a special peculiarity in respect of it. No one would think, from seeing the two instances together in Niebuhr, that the rule, (if we set aside the Ravenna inscription, which Niebuhr does not seem to like to mention), has got nothing but them to stand on. Niebuhr adds from Pliny (N. H. in. 19) that Cato stated, (it is to be supposed in his Origines), that the foundation of Ameria took place 964 years before the war with Perses, that is in fact, from his own time. Now one purpose of Cato's book, so far as we know it, was to do for as many cities of Italy as he could, what he has here done for Ameria, that is, state as a fact at what time their foundation took place : Cato was an antiquarian, and calculated perhaps the date of Ameria as he did that of Rome, or perhaps found traditions there fixing in some way its date: but there is a difference between the supposition or establishment of a date as a, fact and the reckoning from it as an epoch, and that " an era from the foundation prevailed at Ameria" is quite an ^unauthorized conclusion from Cato's statement. It would be very interesting to make out how far there was anything of the nature of genuine epochal city-dating in Italy, and I am very far from imitating Scaliger and ^Niebuhr, and making a counter general as- sertion on the other side : but such transference of assertions as we have Vol. I. March, ] 854. 6