Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/87

 On tlie Bating of Ancient History. 77 1. Common retrograde dating B. C. is instantly transferred into it by subtracting it (leaving out the thousands, if it is not in the 1st Chiliad), from 1000, and adding one for the current year : prefixing then, if there were no thousands in the old date, the Roman numeral I, if there were, the Roman numeral next above the number of them. 2. It falls in with all other sorts of dating which we have to come across, and helps our conception of them, instead of running counter to them : thus when we know that the 1st Olympiad began in the summer of I. 225, we mentally see the Olympiads running parallel to our reckoning and filling the cen- turies at the rate of 25 to each, so that each year 25 of a century marks another 25th Olympiad past, I. 625 marks the end of the 100th, and since the reckoning joins on to our era, A. D. 25 the end of the 200th. So for the years of Rome : we see them as it were running on two centuries and a half (we must add 3 years to their number for the Varronian reckoning, or accordingly for the others) behind the chiliadic. 3. It falls in with modern dating 51, (as we have just to a certain degree seen) and brings the whole of history for us as it were into one series : for we see as readily that 1. 1000 continues to A. D. I, as we see that A. D. 1000 goes on to A. D. 1001. Nor is there any real practical difficulty in the passing from one ancient chiliad to another, supposing, in the course of historical discovery, we should have much to do that: the chiliads are not so much numbers to us, as great spaces of time before our mental eye, and we should count as readily from II. 1000 to I. 1, as again from 1000 to 1001. 4. It is convertible instantly, if not identical with, any simi- lar scheme of dating, any, that is, in which the first year A. D. is the first of a chiliad, or which is continuous with modern dating. Several such might be imagined : as for instance the calling the year 2000 B. C. (retrograde) the commencement of the Historic Period, (it is very near Eusebius's date of the beginning of de- tailed history, his epoch of Abraham and Semiramis), and dating 51 Ancient and modern history would meant, (Paneg. 8), rd iraXaid icaiv&s probably both be the better if instead of dieXdeiv nal irepi tQv veuxrrl yeyevr]fjt.- keeping them so apart as we generally vuiv dpxalws eiweiv, and so in Pliny's do, we could look at them more in one phrase, (Nat. Hist. Introd.), vetustis view, and could, after a better fashion novitatem dare, novis auctoritatem. than the rhetorical one which Isocrates