Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/82

 72 Jo u rnal of Ph ilo logy. least make them dependent upon that. This applies very much to any dating from a supposed epoch of the creation : besides that it is undesirable to attempt to assume an absolutely initial epoch, especially when, as is practically the case, the series of years for so long a time will have no events or very few to be referred to it, and the part where it is wanted and employed will be the part far advanced in it, with uselessly large numbers. But what is the greatest objection to more than one epoch is, that the use of more divides history into separate series or parts, whereas it is a great part of the use of a good chronology to compare and bring it together: time itself is a simple progression, and the measure of time which we apply to history should be, if possible, simple and uniform also. Much of this applies in the same way to the dating of the history of nations by what we consider their own national epochs, which destroys the simplicity of history, and renders it much more difficult to have such a general and comparative conception of it as shall be fit to deduce laws from, or found any scientific conclusions upon : while at the same time it is quite a delusion to imagine that in this way we are at all making the history more real, or doing in any respect what the Greeks and Romans, for instance, did themselves. Olympiads and years of Rome were both of them, for the greater part of the history of the two countries, ways of reckoning applied to it by chroniclers after it was past and cold, just as we may apply any way of reckoning we please now : if we want to have the living con- temporaneous marking of the time we must have well up the lists of archons and consuls, and associate the events with them. We have an idea of a modern century as a sort of real thing, to which we refer any events of history, in whatever country, taking place in it, and which brings them into a sort of relation uitli each other : any conception of this kind is quite destroyed by the idea of centuries of Rome to which only Roman events are to be referred, while we are to refer Greek to centuries of Olympiads ; and the ancient world, which was as much one and a whole as the modern, is divided to us into a number of frag- mentary periods, of which themselves in consequence our idea can be but very insufficient. It was said above that it is undesirable to try to fix an abso- lutely initial epoch, because we shall either be in danger of