On the Dating of Ancient History. 59 passed his literary life, or much of it, at Athens, and wrote a vast history almost of the known world, including his own times, is said to have been the first to supply this defect. For this there were various sorts of reckoning, and various registers not used as reckoning, and only incidentally serving the purpose of marking past time, open to him: the one he chose, probably both for its Panhellenic character, and for the length of time which the record went back, was the register of Olympic games or Olympic foot-race victors, who were the eponyms to distin- guish the celebrations. We have no account that the succession of Olympic periods had ever been used to mark time before 20 , nor was it likely it should be so : it was only incidentally that it did mark it, and the registered number of foot-race victors showed the number of Olympic periods which had passed since the register had been begun 21 . The beginning of Olympiadic dating, then, was simply the numbering the Olympiads according to the registered victors, and calling the one associated with the earliest preserved name the first Olympiad : and then transferring events from the from Plutarch (Nicias, i). Nor, accord- ing to Polybius, did he follow his own rule of truth. 20 The mention, in contemporary his- tory, of the celebration of the Olympic games, as a fact in a particular year, (generally too with the name of the foot- race, or occasionally pancratiac, victor, by which the Olympiad is identified, and which makes it a regular eponymous dating), occurs for instance in Thucydi- des (the numeric mention of them in Xenophon, as Hell. I. 2, being an ad- mitted interpolation) ; and such was probably an additional reason to make Timseus use that way of reckoning. What he did, Polybius tells us, was the reducing, by a careful compari- son, all the other eponymous Grecian reckonings, to which events had, by those who recorded them, been referred, to Olympiadic, and perhaps to kings of Sparta. Whether, however, it was he who first exhibited the Olympiads nu- merically, that is, distinguished particu- lar Olympiads by their number, instead of by the victor in them, does not seem to appear. But the number, for long after him, did not quite thrust out the name : for a very long time the full Grecian dating for past history was, by the number of the Olympiad, the name of the victor, and the archon at Athens, all together. 21 The hazard of transferring epony- mous reckoning into numeric is, that we never can be certain but that in some year some extraordinary event may have interrupted the course, and a year or perhaps more have no name to it. There was danger of confusion at least in three Olympiads, which were called dvoXvfiwl- aSes by the Eleans, in consequence of disputes about the presidency. (See Pau- san. 6. 22. 2.) The registers or extra- neous history may indicate this, and where it is known there is no harm : but of course in early times they also may not. And even if it is known, it is pos- sible that the reckoning, as a general one, may become confused through peo- ple not thinking of it.
