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LEGENDARY HISTORY PRIOR TO 1st CENTURY B.C.
By Darrell Wolcott
The traditional history of Wales usually
begins about the time Rome left Britain in the early 5th century AD. The events told of some families in the
3rd and 4th centuries are considered historic, but we tend to treat all stories about people who lived prior to the first
landing of Julius Caesar in Britain as legendary. Our own dividing line between that which is history and that which
is probably legend is the birth of Beli Mawr c. 130 BC.
On this page, we shall present
papers dealing with much more ancient people whom very early writers either believed to be historic or thought the stories
attributed to them might have happened.
A discussion of the Trojan man, Brutus,
who Nennius said was the founder of Britain and to whom the pedigree of Beli Mawr is traced. Here, we date Brutus as born
c. 835BC and show how such a date is nearly 300 years too late to be reconciled with the traditional 1184BC dating of the
Fall of Troy.
A chronological analysis of the "dating"
used by Eratosthenes to suggest the year BC in which ancient events took place, which includes pedigrees of the men associated
with those events, and concludes his dating was perhaps 216 years too early for the Fall of Troy. Accordingly, one of
the Nennius pedigrees for Brutus might chronologically accord with a birthdate 5 generations after the Fall of Troy.
Romulus, Legendary Eponym of Rome
A review of the early pedigrees of Romulus
to show that his birth in 771BC might not have been over 400 years after the Fall of Troy as most would claim; that this birthdate
is wholly consistent with our revised date of 968BC for Troy's fall.
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