38 HISTORY OF GREECK. perience of historical evidence and the powerful ascendency of religion and patriotism in predisposing them to antiquarian belief, and he therefore accepts the problem as they have bequeathed it, adding his own efforts to bring it to a satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, he not only follows them with some degree of reserve and uneasiness, but even admits important distinctions quite foreign to their habits of thought. Thucydides talks of the deeds of Hellen and his sons with as much confidence as we now Bpeak of William the Conqueror : Mr. Clinton recognizes Hel- len, with his sons Dorus, .ZEolus, and Xuthus,.as fictitious persons. Herodotus recites the great heroic genealogies down from Kad- mus and Danaus, with a belief not less complete in the higher members of the series than in the lower : but Mr. Clinton admits a radical distinction in the evidence of events before and after the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B. c., "the first date in Grecian chronology (he remarks, p. 123,) which can be fixed upon authentic evidence" the highest point to which Grecian chronology, reckoning upward, can be carried. Of this impor- tant epoch in Grecian development, the commencement of authentic chronological life, Herodotus and Thucydides had no knowledge or took no account : the later chronologists, from Timaeus downwards, noted it, and made it serve as the basis of their chronological comparisons, so far as it went : but neither Eratosthenes nor Apollodorus seem to have recognized (though Varro and Africanus did recognize) a marked difference in respect of certainty or authenticity between the period before and the period after. In farther illustration of Mr. Clinton's opinion that the first recorded Olympiad is the earliest date which can be fixed upon authentic evidence, we have, in p. 138, the following just remarks in reference to the dissentient views of Eratosthenes, Phanias, and Kallimachus, about the date of the Trojan Avar : " The chro- nology of Eratosthenes (he says), founded on a careful comparison of circumstances, and approved by those to whom the same stores of information were open, is entitled to our respect. But we must remember that a conjectural date can never rise to the authority of evidence ; that what is accepted as a substitute for testimony is not an equivalent : witnesses only can prove a date, and in the want of these, the knowledge of it is plainly beyond our reach
