4

CHRONOLOGY.

Introduc- iian empire, publifhed a breviary or lift of the Olympie vidlors;and about ten years before the fall thereof, Ephorus, the difcipleof Ifocrates, formed a chronological hiflory of Greece, begin-ning with the return of the Heraclidae into Peloponnefus, andending with the fiege of Perinthus, in the twentieth year of Phi-lip, the father of Alexander the Great : but he digeftcd thingsby generations, and the reckoning by Olympiads was r.ot vet inufe; nor doth it appear, that the reigns of kings were yet fetdown by numbers of years. The Arundelian marbles werecompofed fixty years after the death of Alexander the Great (an.4, olymp. 128.) and yet mention not the olympiads : but in thenext olympiaci, Timaeus Siculus publiihed an hiftory in feveraibooks down to his own times, according to the olympiads, com-pari ng the ephori, the kings of Sparta, the archons of Athens,.and the prieftefles of Argos, with the olympie vidtorsfo as tomake the olympiads, and the genealogies and fuccefiions ofkings, archons, and priefteffes, and poetical hiftories fuit withone another, according to the beft of his judgment. And wherehe left off, Polybius began and carried on the hiftory.

* So then a little after the death of Alexander'the Great, ffteybegan to fet down the generations, reigns and fuccefiions, innumbers of years; and by putting reigns and fuccefiions equi-pollent to generations, and three generations to an hundred ? oran hundred and twenty years, as appears by their chronology,they have made the antiquities of Greece three or four hundredyears older than the truth. And this was the original of thetechnical chronology of the Greeks. Eratofthenes wrote aboutan hundred years after tlie death of Alexander the Great: hewas followed by Apollodcras, and thefe two have been followedever fince by chronologers.

But how uncertain their chronology is, and how doubtful it.•was reputed by the Greeks of thofe times, may he underftood byMntteiiieot thefe paftages of Plutarch. “ Some reckon, laith he, 1 Lycur-i.>cur-u S . f i g HS contemporary to Iphitus, and'to have been his companion inordering the olympie feltivals: amongft whom was Ariftotle the" philofopher, arguing from the olympie difc, which had theH name of Lycurgus upon it. Gthers fupputing the times by the

w fuccelfion