Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/88

 1 8 Journal of Philology. the two chiliads till the birth of Christ straightforward in that, as we have dated in the two chiliads since : we might then com- pare the pre-Christian and the post- Christian periods together, and should perhaps find some analogies between them. We shall see a wonderful waking up of life and literature in the 15th and 16th centuries of each, and might put Greek literature alongside of modern ones, and perhaps be helped, by such similarity of chronological view, in judging respectively of them. We should be more conveniently placed for making out how far the Greek literature should be considered a "revival of letters" two chiliads before the modern one, or how far a beginning of literature alto- gether : whether, in tracing the rude essays of it, we are really come to an infancy of the human race, or whether the heroic ages are but an earlier chivalry and mediaevalism, hiding from us another civilization they had ruined. In concluding this paper, which now at last, however abruptly, must be done, I must ask indulgence from the general reader for the long notes and references, which yet I fear have not been long enough to give him, as. I should have wished, ready means of testing the general assertions I have been obliged to make : and from the mathematical reader, for having said so little on the relation o^ the marking of time to the measuring it. But I have wished to make the paper entirely historical, nor, in fact, am I capable of making it other : and if I have given the reader any clearer notion of the history of past reckoning, or any sug- gestion which may help or facilitate his historical studies, I am satisfied. J. G. Though this paper has been already too long, yet as there are some observations of Niebuhr's (H. R. Vol. I. p. 268, H. and T.) very interesting, and taking a different view of tho matter, a few romarks on them seem required as an appendix. Niebuhr is a strong polyepochist, and as much opposed as I am to retrograde dating. On the subject of epochal realism or conscientious- ness, he is a little either obscure or inconsistent : " for practical purposes nothing more is required," ho says, u in an epoch, than that the point it begins at should bo fixed relatively : the first year even of our own com- mon era is notoriously misplaced : only such chronological doterminateness must not be mistaken for historical certainty." So far good : but when ho goes on to define the two things which make an epoch bad, and the three which mako it good, wo have for the bad characters, first backward