Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 June 5

= June 5 =

Perfect Agreement of Roman consular lists
Starting from what year, exactly, do ALL Roman consular lists (given by various Roman historians, annalists, fasti, etc.) begin being perfectly synchronized with one another ? I ask this because I know that there are, for instance, some (no so) minor disagreements between Varro and Livy, to name but a couple. (A scholarly critique of traditional Varronian chronology can be found here). — 82.79.182.242 (talk) 10:11, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I would speculate that the answer is never given that histories coming from some 1000 years later also are unreliable. Truly independent historians from 2000+ years ago are unlikely to agree when we don't even have agreement on lists of kings from, say, 10th century Denmark (see List of legendary kings of Denmark), etc.  If any such lists were synchronized, from what I know about historiography, it would be more an indication that one list used the other as a source, rather than that they independently arrived at the same chronology. -- Jayron 32 01:39, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
 * This is actually something that is particularly well known, since the Romans used the names of the consuls as part of the date on basically everything, including inscriptions in stone or bronze. However, I'm not sure there is any time past which every source will be in agreement, given List_of_Roman_consuls. Though maybe you could check out the book used for that section, The magistrates of the Roman Republic, by T. Robert S. Broughton. Basically, no one source has a complete chronology, some have gaps, some use different versions of the same consul's name, which can cause confusion, some have typos, some typos were later edited (perhaps wrongly), and some authors may have deliberately inserted a falsehood to shift blame for an event. Someguy1221 (talk) 01:56, 6 June 2018 (UTC)