Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/85

 On the Dating of Ancient History. 75 ginning, and not upwards from an end. The epoch is more like noon in the day, which is the fixed point of measurement of time, and in regard to which we speak of the forenoon and the afternoon ; but we do not count the forenoon backwards as we count the afternoon forwards ; we count the forenoon forwards from an assumed point twelve hours back from the noon, or twelve hours ahead of a previous noon : and nine o'clock in the forenoon does not mean nine hours before noon, but nine hours past out of the twelve before it. A retrograde counting of time is so unlike life and reality, that we cannot possibly use it in practice : we are accustomed to call the Roman reckoning of days in the month the most awkward proceeding that human wit could have devised 60 ; surely then, as the whole tendency of history now is to get more lifelike, it is time we should banish from it the con- tinuous retrograde reckoning. No violent change in the way of reckoning is possible for a historian, nor if possible, would it be desirable : and it is one enormous advantage for history as it is written now, that there is one sort of dating both for literature and for current life, and not, as in Greek history after Timaeus, Olympiads for the learned and all sorts of eponyms for the vulgar. Any sort therefore of change of reckoning into a philosophical period, as Scaliger proposed, would be impracticable : modern and current dating could not be reduced to it ; and it is of more consequence for history that the dating of ancient history should be like, or in relation to that of modern, than that it should be exhibited in a shape astronomically perfect. But it surely might be possible, with very little change in the dating of ancient history, and only such a change as would make it more harmonize with the dating of modern, to preserve the reference of the dating of pre- Christian history to the epoch we date from, and yet to make the dating run substantially forward, as life and action do : let us see how this might be done. All that seems necessary is to change what we may call the unit of retrogression. It is now the years we count backwards, 50 The Athenian backward reckon- numbers represented, so to call it, the ing, in which during the last ten days of waning moon ; but supposing the Ro- a month supposed to correspond with man months to have been once a similar the moon, the numbers became smaller reckoning, it is hard to see any meaning as the month went on, if not very rea- in the retrogression before the Ides, sonable, is at least picturesque, and the