Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/72

 56 HJ--TORY OF GREECE. has no other value except to illustrate the ideas which guided the Greek mind, and to exhibit its progress from the days of Homer to those of Herodotus. For it argues a considerable mental progress when men begin to methodize the past, even though they do so on fictitious principles, being as yet unprovided with those records which alone could put them on a better course. The Homeric man was satisfied with feeling, imagining, and invading army into Asia, the latter a known date of 334 u. c., the following different reckonings were made: Phanias gave 715 years. Ephorus " 735*" Eratosthenes " 774 " Timaeus. . . 82Q Kleitarchus ) Diiris " 1000 " (Clemens Alexand. Strom, i. p. 337.) Dcmocvitus estimated a space of seven hundred and thirty years between his composition of the Mt/cp^f Aiu/cocr^of and the capture of Troy (Diogen. Laert ix. 41). Isokrates believed the Lacedaemonians to have been estab- ished in Peloponnesus seven hundred years, and he repeats this in three dif- ferent passages (Archidam. p. 118; Panathen. p. 275; De Pace, p. 178). The dates of these three orations themselves differ by twenty-four years, the Archidamus being older than the Panathenaic by that interval ; yet he em- ploys the same number of years for each in calculating backwards to the Trojan war, (see Clinton, vol. i. Introd. p. v.) In round numbers, his calcu- lation coincides pretty nearly with the eight hundred years given by Herod- otus in the preceding century. The remarks of Boeckh on the Parian marble generally, in his Corpus Inscriptionum Grace, t. ii. pp. 322-336, are extremely valuable, but especially his criticism on the epoch of the Trojan war, which stands the twenty -fourth in the Marble. The ancient chronologists, from Damastes and Hellanikus downwards, professed to fix not only the exact year, but the exact month, day, and hour in which this celebrated capture took place. [Mr. Clinton pretends to no more than the possibility of determining the event within fifty years, Introduct. p. vi.] Boeckh illustrates the manner of their argumentation. O. Miiller observes (History of the Dorians, t. ii. p. 442, Eng. Tr.), "In reckoning from the migration of the Heraklidae downward, we follow the Alexandrine chronology, of which it should be observed, that our materials only enable ns to restore it to its original state, not to examine its correctness " But I do not see upon what evidence even so much as this can be done. Mr. Clinton, admitting that Eratosthenes fixed his date by conjecture, sup- poses him to have chosen " a middle point between the longer and shorter computations of his predecessors." Boeckh thinks tins explanation unsafe wfectory (/. c. p. 328).