Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/68

 58 Journal of Philology. interest, the dating was either a secondary point or else was not difficult : a general idea of the distance of events from his own time is the only scheme of dating belonging to Herodotus, and the careful distinguishing each year of his own war, and referring the proper events to it, is pretty well all the chronology neces- sary for Thucydides 1G. How dates were managed by Ephorus 17 and Theopompus, who probably, all things considered, repre- sented the culminating point of history in Greece, we have no information: we may suppose Ephorus to have employed, as occasion called for them, the various state reckonings; Theo- pompus's main history 18 was of an epic character, relating at very great length the life of Philip, with many discursive and descrip- tive episodes: for this, chronology, as for Herodotus, would come in, for the most part, in a secondary manner only. But when, with the Macedonian conquests in Asia, the horizon of the Greeks became vastly widened, both as to time and space, and the Eastern dynastial reckonings and regularly kept annalic histories came more before them, and when history itself in the Greek language, past its noon, began a little to take that tendency to chronicle which belongs both to its infancy and its decrepitude, the want of a system of historic dating probably began to be felt 19. Timeeus, a native of Tauromenium, but who 18 For events in former history he ad captandum descriptive redundancy of uses a backward date from his own time Herodotus. The cure which each has to (cf. I. 13.) administer in his way for the luxuriance 17 The character of the history of is severe annalism and chronology. Ephorus is contrasted by Polyb. (9. 1.) Thucydides would have heartily sub- with the geuealogic, and with his own, scribed (and I hope nothing here said the pragmatic, and is described as having about epochal over-conscientiousness will been irepl ray diroiiclas ical ktL<tcis ical lead any one to think I do not subscribe) cvyycvelas, with more regard therefore to one dictum of Timseus, Tlfiai6t <prj<ri probably to variety, than to any strict- fi^yiarw afiJLprrjfxa irepl rip lorroplav eu/cu ness as to time. He was a great exag- rb f/e08os. (Mtiller, F.H.G.v.i,p.aio). gerator, and not apparently very exact Histories may fail, he says, in other re- in anything. spects, and be history still : but if they 18 His History of Philip. (Mtiller, fail in this, the name does not belong to Fragm. Hist. Grsec. Vol. I. p. lxv.) them. Certainly the idea of history and 10 Thucydides and Timeeus were both of its real excellence did not progress of them prosaists or positivists, as a- between this and the criticisms of Dio- gainst their predecessors : Timseus finds nysius and Plutarch on Thucydides and fault with the rhetorical redundancy of Herodotus. Timseus gets however very Ephorus, (Mtiller, F. H. G. v. 1, p. 203) hard measure as to his narrative powers, much as Thucydides sharply hints at the compared with those of Thucydides,