Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/70

 60 Journal of Philology. various particular reckonings to this general one, and refer- ring contemporary events to that. The succession of earlier Olympiads is in no sense established to have been a contem- porary reckoning, like the years of Nabonassar, nor is the first Olympiad necessarily anything more than a fixed point to date from, assumed long after: it is perfectly possible that the Olympic registers which Hippias, and afterwards Timaeus and Eratosthenes, collected, may have been for the earlier parts of them all a forgery, and it is very little consequence to chronology whether they were or not, for no early events of any importance were contemporaneously assigned to them 22 : they would have made as good a way of dating for Timaeus if he had invented them himself, except that the opinion of their genuineness was necessary for the current adoption of the way of dating by them. Nor is it very certain whether the first Olympiad represents any historical event, such as the establishment or restoration of the games, or whether Corcebus was merely the earliest vic- tor's name preserved : for chronology, the matter is of no con- sequence 23. Eratosthenes, as has been mentioned, improved and rectified the Olympiadic dating of Timaeus, and it became the regular recognized literary reckoning for Greeks in all parts of the world, and continued so for many centuries. But the current reckonings in Greece were still kept in the old individual and eponymous ways, while for Greeks away from Greece, as at Alexandria, who would date histories in Olympiads, the current 28 It is but seldom that, as in the neither they nor the moderns have been case of Pheidon, (01. 8) Olympiac hia- able to lay hold of and fix ; and Clinton tory is connected with general. has been obliged to resort to the last 88 There is probably very little doubt expedient of chronologers, that of dou- but that the registers are genuine, but bling him. Happily, however, the regis- when we attempt to connect with the tral epoch of Coroebus was independent beginning of them any fact of greater of Iphitus, though otherwise most nnim- historic importance than that Coroebus portant ; but in reality it was just its was the victor, what difficulties we fall own unimportance, and its association into may be seen in Clinton, F. H. I. at the same time with what was import- 142. The Greeks in a general way con- tant, that gave it its value. Scaliger, sidered the 1st Olympiad, or that of whose feelings are hurt by the Christian Coroebus, to represent what they called era resting on a misdate, lays a trap for the re-establishment of the games by himself by needlessly calling the Olym- Iphitus, but as a matter of accurate piads Olympiades Iphitese. (See for inst. chronology, Iphitus is a person whom De Em. Temp. 5. 383.)