Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/71

On the Dating of Ancient History. 61 dating would be according to some other reckoning such as those already alluded to. Eratosthenes however chronologized far back before the first Olympiad, and fixed various epochs to date pre- Olympiadic events from. One famous one was that of the Trojan war : and it certainly is rather a pity, while epochs were being fixed, that this was not taken for a fixed point for annual Grecian dating, instead of the first Olympiad for Olympiadic 24 . As was before observed about the first Olympiad, it is no sort of consequence what the fixed point is suggested by or represents, or whether it represents anything, except that it must be supposed to represent something much in men's thoughts and of general interest ; the Trojan war would have exactly suited for this. And the advan- tage of dating from it would have been, that according to Roman ideas of early history, it would have answered as well for Roman dating as for Greek 25 . The Trojan war was the starting-point of Roman traditional history, more even than of Greek; Cato, in computing the foundation of the city, found and represented it to be so many years vo-repovo-av nZv 'iXta/cwi/ 26 : his countrymen might have contented themselves with the Trojan epoch, which they thus used ; for the date of the Roman they found very hard to settle. - i Timaeus may be called in some sense the originator of Roman, as well as of Greek, epochal dating : for it was he who apparently, to the best of Dionysius' knowledge, first fixed the time of the foundation of the city, and synchronizing it as he did with that of Carthage, in a year not long before the beginning of the Olympiads, he probaHy considered the common epoch of the two cities as the beginning of a supposed Western Period, like his Grecian Olympiadic. The Romans however afterwards reckoned the origin of their city much later, though they could not fix it 24 There is strong reason against such quite as much in the reality of the Tro- an epoch as this in the fact, that though jan war as the Eomans in that of Eo- Eratosthenes' fixing of the time was mulus. the one generally allowed, yet still there 25 Niebuhr says (H. E. i. p. 259), were others, and especially Herodotus "For Greece the method devised by considered it earlier (See Grote, H. G. Eratosthenes, of reckoning from the fall II. p. 76, 77.) But in the mythical of Troy to indicate relative dates, was a character of the epoch there is no rea- happy thought." He might have said son against it, for the foundation of more. Eome by Eomulus is quite as mythical, 26 Dion. A. E. I. 74, and Nieb. H. and both Greeks and Eomans believed E. 1. 267.