In particular they tried to match up their history with the regular four-year cycles of the Olympic Games, which apparently offered a fixed and authentic time frame – although, as is now recognised, this was itself partly the product of earlier ingenious speculation. It was a tricky and highly specialised debate. But gradually the different views coalesced around the middle of what we call the eighth century BCE, as scholarly opinion reached the conclusion that Greek and Roman history ‘began’ at roughly the same time. What became the canonical date, and one still quoted in many modern
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