Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/86

68 HISTORY OF tJCFKCK. of peace : perhaps this may have boon a point carried by Nikia* at Athens, in spite of Alkibiades. What other deputies attended num utrique populi idem sit : scd ubi differunt cycli, altero populo priu* intercalante mensem dnm non intercalat alter, eorum qui non intercalarunt mensis ccrtus cedit jam in cum mensem alterorum qui prrccedit ilium ecu ruljro respondet certus iste mensis : quod tamen negligere solent chrono- logi." Compare also the valuable Dissertation of K. F. Hermann, Ueber die Griechische Monatsknndc, Getting. 1844, pp. 21-27, where all that is known about the Grecian names and arrangement of months is well brought together. The names of the Argeian months we hardly know at all (see K. F. Her mann, pp. 84-124) : indeed, the only single name resting on positive proof, is that of a month Hermceus. How far the months of Argos agreed with those of Epidaurus or Sparta we do not know, nor have we any right to presume that they did agree. Nor is it by any means clear that every city in Greece had what may properly be called a system of intercalation, so correct as to keep the calendar right without frequent arbitrary interferences. Even at Athens, it is not yet satisfactorily proved that the Metonic calen- dar was ever actually received into civil use. Cicero, in describing the practice of the Sicilian Greeks about reckoning of time, characterizes their interferences for the purpose of correcting the calendar as occasional rather than systematic. Venes took occasion from these interferences to make a still more violent change, by declaring the Ides of January to be the calends of March (Cicero, Verr. ii, 52, 129). Now where a people are accustomed to get wrong in their calendar, and to see occasional interferences introduced by authority to set them right, the step which I here suppose the Argeians to have taken about the inva sion of Epidaurus will r.ot appear absurd and preposterous. The Argeiana would pretend that the leal timvj for celebrating the festival of Karneia had not yet arrived. On that point, they were not bound to follow the views of other Dorian states, since there does not seem to have been any recog- nized authority for proclaiming the commencement of the Karneian truce, as the Eleians proclaimed the Olympic and the Corinthians the Isthmiac truce. In saying, therefore, that the twenty-sixth of the month preceding Karneius should be repeated, and that the twenty-seventh should not bo recognized as arriving for a fortnight or three weeks, the Argeian govern- ment would only be employing an expedient the like of which had been before resorted to ; though, in the case before us, it was employed for a fraudulent purpose. The Spartan month Hekatombeus appears to have corresponded with the Attic month Hekatombseon ; the Spartan month following it, Karneius, with !hc Attic month Metageitnion (Hermann, p. 112), our months July and August ; such correspondence being by no means exact or constant. Both Dr. Arnold and Goller speak of Hekatombeus as if it were the Argeian