archaic greece in hellenistic chronography

Archaic Greece in Hellenistic ChronographyAuthor(s): G. L. HuxleySource: Hermathena, No. 184 (Summer 2008), pp. 5-17Published by: Trinity College DublinStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23041578 .

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Archaic Greece in Hellenistic

Chronography1

by G. L. Huxley

Some time ago an invitation from the Classical Review prompted me to think anew about the chronology of early Greece. The

book to be reviewed was P.-J- Shaw's Discrepancies in Olympiad

Dating and Chronological Problems of Archaic Peloponnesian

History. It is a serious work of scholarship and was published in

a reputable place - by the Franz Steiner Verlag

- as No. 166 of

the Historia Einzelschriften-, I was allowed some additional space for the review, but it was not possible to do justice to all the

arguments. Dr. Shaw's conclusions are radical; indeed they are

so revolutionary that, if sound, they would entail a rewriting of

most text books of early Hellenic political and literary history. In her conclusions Dr. Shaw suggests that 'the century

preceding Xerxes' invasion was a much busier one than the

conventional model would suggest. The Olympic Games

became a festival of more than local importance about 100 years before the Ionian Revolt. A generation later Pheidon effected his

coup.' Other inferences were: the first and second Messenian

Wars occurred in the century that ended with the Persian Wars.

Tyrtaeus was a late archaic poet. The battle of Hysiae was a late

archaic event. Alcman can be assigned to the second half of the

sixth century B.C. The war for Sigeion, together with the

arbitration by Periandros, can reasonably be assigned to the

mid-sixth century. These and other claims compel a re

examination of the evidence for Greek chronography. In this

paper we contemplate elements of such a re-examination. What

earlier sources of knowledge were available to Hellenistic

chronographers? What use did they make of them? How did

they determine dates? To what extent did their inferences

correspond with the truth?

A scholar at work after the death of Alexander the Great but

before the resources of the Library at Alexandria were accessible

1 This is the text of a lecture given in the University of Milan on 23 III 2006 by

kind invitation of Professor Luigi Lehnus. I thank him and his colleagues for helpful discussion afterwards. Some references have been included in the text, but sparingly.



6 G. L. Huxley

had the benefit of much previous study. Herodotus provided an

outline of genealogical chronology for the sixth century B.C., and he drew upon the family traditions of several cities; for

example, the Logioi could explain the accessions to power of

Peisistratos in Attica and the number of his exiles; such

traditions even included some lengths of years, for example the

six years passed by Samians at Kydonia in Crete (3.59.2). Yet

Herodotus records the name of but one Athenian archon. The

Athenian Archon-list was published on stone about 425 B.C., but the extant fragments suggest that names only were listed, without historical additions recording events, and it is not clear

how such irregularities as the years of anarchiai in the aftermath of Solon's legislation or the two years and two months of

Damasias's archonship were recorded in the inscription. We learn about these irregularities from Aristotle's, Constitution of the Athenians (13.2), a work which reflects the activity of local historians in linking the Attic Archon-list to events. In the archaic period up to the Battle of Marathon Aristotle mentions the archontes Aristaichmos at the time of Drakon's legislation, Solon's archonship, Damasias' prolonged archonship, the coup of Peisistratos when Komeas was archon, the death of

Peisistratos when Philoneos was archon, the reforms of

Kleisthenes, when Isagoras was archon, and the oath imposed upon the Council of Five Hundred when Hermokreon was archon. Some lists had historical additions to the names of officials from the time of their composition. For example, in the second book of his Priestesses of Hera at Argos Hellanikos of Lesbos stated that Theokles from Chalkis together with Chalkidians and Naxians founded the city of Naxos in Sicily (.F.Gr. Hist. 4 F82). The lists gave the possibility of determining an order of events, but to align one list with another was difficult because local civil calendars were not synchronised between cities, and written local traditions earlier than the Persian Wars were rare indeed; Thucydides, recognising the

problems of synchronism, chose to date by summers and

winters, but he knew that at the time of the Theban attack

upon Plataia Chrysis had been Priestess in Argos and Ainesias

(principal) Ephor in Sparta; the two officials he was able to declare contemporary with the second month of Pythodoros' archonship at Athens (2.2.1).



Archaic Greece in Hellenistic Chronography 7

A great strengthening of the structure was undertaken by Aristotle and Kallisthenes in their work on the Pythian victor

list at Delphi (F.Gr. Hist. 124 T23). This too contained

annotations at least at the beginning, because they distinguished the Agon Chrematites (assigned to the time of the successful war

against Kirrha) from the Agon Stephanites celebrated after the

war. Between these events befel the final defeat of the Kirrhan

remnant. Aristotle, as we see from the Politics (1315b 22-26), also worked out a chronology of the Corinthian tyranny from

the accession of Kypselos to the overthrow of Psammetichos, a

period to which he assigned 73V2 years. Almost certainly Aristotle aligned his Corinthian chronology with the Pythian, because the institution of the Isthmian games was thought to

have celebrated the end of the tyranny and also to have been

close in time to the Pythian celebrations of 582/1. This was an

epochal year, when Damasias was archon at Athens, in which

the whole college of the Seven Wise Men was recognised as

wise. According to Plato in the Protagoras (343 A) the Seven

gathered at Delphi to honour Apollo; the Seven, said Demetrios

of Phaleron {F.Gr. Hist. 228 Fl), were recognised in the

archonship of Damasias, the wisdom of Thales having been the

first to be acknowledged. The list of sophoi was valuable to

chronographers. (Plato mentions Thales, Pittakos, Bias, Solon,

Kleoboulos, Myson, and Chilon. Periandros is not named here,

and the omission was apt; he was already dead.) Much had been done to fix a chronological framework at

the time of the death of Alexander, but work was still needed to

strengthen it. Timaios of Tauromenion was as notorious for his

censorious attitude to other scholars as he was for his assiduous

research. Polybius (12.11.1 {F.Gr. Hist. 566 T10)) remarks

upon the seeking-out by Timaios of inscriptions on stelai and of

texts on door-jambs of temples; and it is clear that Timaios tried

to synchronise lists - how many alignments he made depends

upon the punctuation of the text of Polybius, but he may well

have tried to coordinate Ephors and kings at Sparta with Attic

archontes and Olympic victors with priestesses at Argos. To align all these lists would have been made easier by a synchronical

table, of a kind we do not know to have existed before the

Chronicle of Eusebius.



8 G. L. Huxley

The absence of prose chronicles entailed search of

contemporary references in archaic lyric poetry. An illuminating example of an attempt to connect events with a list of officials is to be seen in Paros. A local historian, Demeas, made use of a list of Parian Archons and of the poetry of Archilochos the Parian to reconstruct of sequence of events in his island's history in the time of the poet (F.Gr. Hist. No. 502). It is manifest from the

poetical relics of Archilochos that he addressed by name many friends and acquaintances. Demeas - whose date is not known

(Felix Jacoby tentatively placed him in the first half of the third

century B.C.) - was able to date events according to a lost

sequence of Parian archons in the time of the poet. In the time of an archon whose name begins Eur — a penteconter conveying ambassadors from Miletos was wrecked in the strait between Paros and Naxos. One alone of the embassy survived, having, so the local story affirmed, been carried by a dolphin to the shore at the harbour called 'Syrian'. His name was Koiranos and the cave was called the Koiraneion after him. Dealings with Thracians — in or near Thasos — are also described, Archilochos

again being quoted, but no archon-name survives on the stone.

Amphitimos, according to Demeas, was archon for a second time when there was a Parian victory over Naxians; here Archilochos is again quoted. The poet's friend Glaukos is also mentioned on the stone.

Demeas was able to combine local history with the poet's biography but, so far as we know, little was said about the wider Hellenic world by him. Nonetheless there were distant interests in Hellenistic Paros amongst the local antiquaries, as is evident from the Marmor Parium. In the Marble a Parian Archon

(whose name is not certain) is assigned to the year of the Athenian archon Diognetos of 264/3 B.C. A remarkable feature of the Marble is the neglect of events in Paros. Extra-Parian events are selected and dated from the supposed era of the Athenian king Kekrops onwards {F.Gr. Hist. 239 Al), as though the compiler saw a need to supplement purely epichoric history. A key date, one we have already mentioned, is given in the

Marmor; this is the Stephanites Agon at Delphi, placed three hundred and eighteen years before Diognetos' archonship in

Athens, that is, in the equivalent of 582/1 B.C. (239 A38).




Local history could have legal implications. There was a

longstanding dispute between Samos and Priene concerning a

border territory on the Mykale peninsula. The land was called

Dryoussa and there was a fortress in it called Karion, perhaps

originally held by Karians. Successive kings and potentates from

Alexander the Great to Antiochos a general of Ptolemy

Euergetes had been asked to arbitrate. Early in the third century Rhodian arbitrators decided the matter and marked out the

frontier. Their decision was upheld by the Roman Senate in the

second century B.C. and later by other unidentified arbitrators.

Among the arbitrators was Lysimachos; it is clear that he made

use of local histories in deciding in favour of Samos in his

rescript, but the Rhodians favoured Priene. What emerges from

the inscriptions and the literary texts is that the arbitrators were

aware of a sequence of historical events. First there was the

Meliac war. That was earlier than the Kimmerian attacks on

Ionia in the mid-seventh century B.C. Then came the Battle at

the Oak at which the Samians and Milesians in alliance inflicted

a crushing defeat on Priene, a defeat so terrible that it became

proverbial. Aristotle had already discussed the proverb and set it

in its historical context, but Aristotle is not among the authors

mentioned in the extant parts of the inscriptions (Aristotle F.576 Rose). After the defeat Bias of Priene went on an embassy from Priene to Samos. The Battle of the Oak thus belonged in

chronography early in the sixth century. That some dated

intervals came down from this epoch in the oral tradition of

southern Ionia is clear from the statement of Aristotle (in Plutarch, Q.G. 20) that the Battle of the Oak took place in the

seventh year after the Prienians had slain one thousand Samians

in another, earlier, battle. Some of these events would have been

mentioned by the late fifth century historian Euagon of Samos; we are specifically told that Euagon was among the writers who

stated that Samos was given the locality Phygela among the

spoils distributed at the end of the Meliac War (F.Gr. Hist. 535

F3). It is likely that there was an oral tradition concerning the

defeat of Melia and the establishment of the joint sanctuary of

the Ionians at the Panionion - the topic of a famous paper 'Panionion' of Wilamowitz, prompted by the German

excavations at Priene before the First World War (5" B Berlin

1906, 38-57). The tradition was preserved in local historians of



10 G. L. Huxley

Ionia and used by the arbitrators. It reached far back to the

seventh century B.C. and earlier (to the Meliac War). Dates

were lacking; but at least one interval was remembered in

southern Ionia and a sequence of events could be determined.

Callimachus was not a chronographer, but he drew on such

local details of tradition in Ionia and elsewhere in the Aitia. He

did not, however, neglect chronography, and it is clear that he

had something to say about the supposed number of Olympiads, thirteen, between Iphitos of Elis and the victory of Koroibos.

These enumerations may have been discussed in his Peri Agonon (F.541 Pf. with Pfeiffer on F.403 Pf.). We should perhaps allow

for Callimachean influence upon the chronographic concerns of

his great pupil Eratosthenes, who was much exercised by the

dating of events between the Trojan War and the first

Olympiad, but such constructions are not our business here

today. We follow the convention in which Archaic Greece

begins with Olympiad I, customarily assigned to the equivalent of 776/3 B.C., some 328 years after the Return of the

Herakleidai in the Chronographiai of Eratosthenes (F'. Gr. Hist.

241 Fl). The epoch depends upon the Olympic victor list

compiled by Hippias of Elis at the end of the fifth century B.C.; a list of victors was set up in the gymnasium at Olympia perhaps as early as the mid-sixth century B.C. (Pausanias 6.6.3) and

Hippias may well have made use of it. The list gradually replaced the Attic archonships as a measure of time; the process is illustrated in the later history of the work of Apollodoros of Athens. In the second century B.C. he wrote his Chronika in

iambic trimeters to aid memory and he dated by Attic archontes, but in a later prose version his dates were converted to years within Olympiads; and so we find Eusebius, for example,

aligning Years of Abraham with Olympiads. Many of the dates

in his Chronicle are nonetheless Apollodoran in origin. There is no compelling reason to doubt that from the first

Olympic Games, in which Koroibos won in the stadion, the

festival was regulated astronomically. The time between any

Olympiad and the second thereafter constituted an instance of the primitive astronomical cycle of the Octaeteris. The time

between any two sequential festivals, four years, was half an Octaeteris. The cycle of 99 lunar months was divided into

alternating intervals of 49 lunar months and 50 lunar months.




The Greeks in the eighth century B.C. were quite capable of

determining such alternations. Later Bacchylides refers to them

in an Ode for Lachon of Keos (VII, 1-3) when he invokes the

Day of prizegiving at Olympia: 'Bright Daughter of Time and

Night, fifty months have brought thee, sixteenth day of the

month in Olympia'. Let us now examine some limbs of the chronological

framework, beginning with the first and second Messenian wars.

From the poetry of Tyrtaios, chronographers were able to make

inferences. Firstly, Theopompos was one of the Spartan kings at

the time of the victory over Messenians in the first war

(Pausanias 4.6.5). Secondly the fighting continued for nineteen

years (Tyrtaios F.5, 4 West). Thirdly the defeated Messenians

fled from the mountains of Ithome in the twentieth year (F.5, 7

West). Fourthly, the second war was fought in the time of

Tyrtaios, two generations later (F.5, 6 West). A piece of

evidence from the epoch of the first war is to be found in the

Corinthian poet Eumelos; two lines of his are quoted by Pausanias (4.33.3) from a prosodion composed for a Messenian

chorus sent to Delos in the following form:

T(p yap 'I0top.aTg KaTa0t>|j.ios cttAeto (xotaa a Ka0apa Kal eXeuBepa crd|ipa\' exoucTa

If, with C.M. Bowra {On Greek Margins [Oxford 1970] 54-55), we emphasize the past tense of the verb errXeTO, then the cult

of Zeus on Mount Ithome had already ceased owing to the

Messenian defeat. The date of Eumelos, a Bacchiad of Corinth,

is to be inferred from a statement of Clement of Alexandria

{Strom. 1.131) that the poet 'overlapped in time' (the word

used is em(3e(3Xr|K:evai) with Archias, another Bacchiad and

the founder of Syracuse. From Thucydides (6.3.2), whose source

is almost certainly Antiochos of Syracuse, the foundation of

Syracuse can be placed a little before 732 B.C. We do not know

who was Clement's authority for the overlap in time of poet and

founder, but from the prosodion it emerges that Messenia had

already been defeated by the time the poem was composed. All

these testimonies are consistent with the placing of the first

Messenian war in the middle or second half of the eighth

century B.C. and not later. Pausanias (4.13.7) places the defeat



12 G. L. Huxley

of the Messenians in Olympiad 14, 1, equivalent to 724/3 B.C.

For the chronology of the first war Pausanias draws on Sosibios, the Laconian historian, and the date falls within the reign of

Theopompos in the scheme of Sosibios. The father of

Theopompos, Nikandros, was in the 34tK year of his reign at the

time of the first Olympic games according to Sosibios (F.Gr. Hist. 595 F2), and Sosibios also stated that Nikandros was

succeeded by Theopompos five years later, in the year

equivalent to 772/1 B.C. The date for the accession of

Theopompos in Eratosthenes and Apollodoros is higher, but it is possible, as Mosshammer (p. 207) argued, that Sosibios

assigned a reign of at least 47 years to Theopompos. There is, however, no doubt that all three chronographers placed the

victory of Theopompos within the eighth century, and many modern scholars have followed them in this. An independent check is provided by the early entries in the Olympic victor list. There were Messenian victors in 768, 764, 752, 748, 744, 740, 736, and none thereafter. The inference is that after 736 Messenia ceased to be an independent state. Another check is

archaeological; it comes from Satyrion in southern Italy. (J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (2 London 2003) 239) Satyrion and Taras were founded by the Partheniai from Sparta in

consequence of political trouble in Laconia after the first Messenian war. The Eusebian date for the settlement at Taras is

706 or thereabouts. Above Iapygian deposits there is sterile

sand, and higher still a stratum entirely of Greek material; this is to be dated, unless our ceramic chronology is seriously amiss, to about 700 B.C. About the same date are two Laconian late Geometric plates from Scoglio del Tonno in Tarentine territory. The archaeological evidence from Taras, therefore, is consistent with the placing of the first Messenian War before the end of the eighth century B.C. In this matter Sosibios, Apollodoros and Eusebius are all vindicated.

According to Strabo (8.4.10 362 Cas.) the allies of the Messenians in the second Messenian war, the war with which

Tyrtaios was contemporary, were the Argives, Pisatans, and Arcadians. The Arcadians were led by Aristokrates king of Arcadian Orchomenos. Some of these details may have come from Tyrtaios, who certainly mentioned Argives and perhaps also Arcadians in battle (P. Oxy. 3316, 15). There is reason to




think that placing the second war sometime in the middle of the

seventh century B.C., about two generations after the first war, is correct. Aristokrates, according to Herakleides of Pontos (in

Diog. Laert. 1.94), ruled over almost the whole of Arcadia; Aristodemos son of Aristokrates was equally powerful. The

daughter of Aristokrates was Eristheneia; she married Prokles

tyrant of Epidauros, and their daughter was Melissa. Melissa

became the wife of Periandros tyrant of Corinth. Melissa, then, was granddaughter of Aristokrates, who led the Arcadians in the

second Messenian war, of the mid-seventh century. She

flourished therefore about 600 B.C. or early in the sixth century at the time of Periandros, who at least from the time of Aristotle

onwards was held to have died shortly before the first Isthmian

games of 582/1. The count of generations from the first

Messenian war is thus consistent with the chronography so far

inferred.

However, some modern scholars have insisted upon a lower

date for the end of the Corinthian tyranny. No ancient

chronographer supports them. The misunderstanding results in

part from an incorrect interpretation of the Herodotean

account of the war between the Mytileneans and the Athenians

in the Troad. The dispute was brought to an end by the

arbitration of Periandros, thus before 585 B.C. according to

Aristotle's chronology of the Corinthian tyranny. In agreement the chronology of Eusebius places an event in the war earlier

than 585. This was the killing of the Athenian Phrynon by Pittakos of Mytilene. The assigned dates are Year of Abraham

1409 and Olympiad 43.2; both are equivalent to 607/6 B.C.

The date is Apollodoran, and consistent with it is the Eusebian

dating to the years 600/599 or 595/4 of Sappho and Alkaios.

Alkaios took part in the Sigeian war, and another part of the

chronographic scheme is to be seen in the dating of Sappho's exile to Sicily to a year between 603/2 and 596/5 in the Parian

Marble (F. Gr. Hist. 239 A36). Herodotus (5.94.1 - 95.2) states that Peisistratos the

Athenian installed his son Hegisistratos in Sigeion. The

historian then looks back to earlier events in the long struggle between Athens and Mytilene in the Troad; the transition to an

earlier time is made clear by the yap in 5.94.2. Herodotus

mentions the loss of his weapons by Alcaeus and the



14 G. L. Huxley

reconciliation of Athenians and Mytileneans by Periandros.

None of these events took place in the time of Hegesistratos son

of Peisistratos. The fighting in the Troad had continued for half

a century and more before the time of Hegesistratos. This brings us to a contemporary of Periandros, the

Milesian philosopher Thales. Apollodoros (Diog. Laert. 1.37,

emended, (F.Gr. Hist. 244 F28)) placed his birth in Olympiad 39.1 (624/3 B.C.). The corrupt number was corrected by Diels.

The correction is required because Apollodoros also wrote that

Thales died aged 78 in the 58th Olympiad 548/5 B.C. His akme,

therefore, in his fortieth year befel in 585/4 B.C. This is the year of the famous eclipse seen during the Medo-Lydian war by combatants near the Halys River. The astronomical date of the

eclipse, whose band of totality is calculated to have passed over

the Halys, is 28 May 585 B.C. Thales is alleged to have

predicted the eclipse. Did Apollodoros learn the date of the eclipse from

Babylonian records? The question must be answered in the

negative. The total eclipse was not visible in Babylon; therefore

it cannot have been recorded in texts applying to Babylon itself. Nor can the exact date have been extracted from Babylonian texts by a user of cuneiform records, such as Berosos, the

Babylonian historian. (He wrote in Greek and dedicated his work to Antiochos Soter c. 270 B.C. {F.Gr. Hist. No. 688)).

[Concerning these problems see especially Alden A.

Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek

Chronographic Tradition (Lewisburg 1979) 264-265]. Berosos, however, made use of the Nabonidus Chronicle and

other texts, and it was from Berosos that Apollodoros obtained a date for the fall of Sardis to Kyros, 547/6. This is not a date

obtainable from the text of Herodotus; it is equivalent to the ninth year of Nabonidus. Three years earlier Kyros defeated the Medes and took Ecbatana, that is in 550 B.C. The fall of

Ecbatana marked the end of the reign of Astyages the Mede.

Apollodoros, taking a reign-length of Astyages of thirty-five years from Herodotus (1.130.1), placed the death of Kyaxares, the accession of his son Astyages, the akme of Thales, and the

eclipse said to have been foretold by Thales all in the same year, 585/4. This epochal year survives in versions of the Chronicle of Eusebius as 586/5 in St Jerome and 583/2 in the Armenian




version. [For detailed reasoning see Mosshammer, op. cit.

chapter 14].

According to Herodotus the opponent of Alyattes of Lydia in the Lydo-Median war was Kyaxares, but there was also a

tradition that Astyages son of Kyaxares and Alyattes had fought

against each other. The original, and respectable, evidence for

war between Alyattes and Astyages was directly or indirectly the

poet Alkaios (P.Oxy. 2506, F.98). In order to reconcile the two

traditions Apollodoros placed the transfer of rule from Kyaxares to Astyages in the year of the eclipse.

Another useful synchronism with Near Eastern events

involves the brother of Alkaios, Antimenidas. We learn from a

fragment of a poem of Alkaios (Z27 L.-P.) that Antimenidas

took mercenary service with the Babylonians. Sometime before

the second fall of Jerusalem (in 586/5) to the Babylonians, Antimenidas had fought for them in the Holy Land. The

synchronisms strengthen the argument for refusing to date

Periandros, Pittakos, Alkaios, Antimenidas, and the floruit of

Thales later than the first quarter of the sixth century. Since all these persons overlapped in time the long reign of

Alyattes, it is proper to draw attention to some archaeological evidence in agreement with the chronography. At Old Smyrna a

general destruction level has been tied to the defeat of the polis

by Alyattes. The king took Smyrna but failed to take

Klazomenai (Herodotus 1.16.2). In the main parts of the

excavations at Old Smyrna there is evidence of destruction.

Early Corinthian pottery, together with the absence of Attic, dates the destruction within the city and also the Lydians' siege mound. On the west side of the excavations, houses built on a

north-south axis were destroyed also in the sack; over this

stratum a later house, the 'Burnt House' was built at an angle to

the axis. Another structure later than the Lydian sack is the

'Pithos Room'. None of the Attic and East Greek pottery in

these later deposits can be dated before about 560 B.C. The

inference is that the general destruction by Alyattes and the

Lydians happened, when Early Corinthian pottery was still in

use, about 600 B.C., early in the long reign of Alyattes Q.M.

Cook, B.S.A. 80(1985) 25-28). Another synchronism with

Alyattes was Periandros' advice to Thrasyboulos of Miletos in

his war against the Lydians. Herodotus (1.20 - 22.4) shows that



16 G. L. Huxley

the advice helped to bring the war to an end. The war befel

between the accession of Alyattes and the death of Periandros —

thus not later than 585 B.C. The pottery from the destruction

level at Smyrna also fits well with the accession year of Alyattes; the Parian Marble (F.Gr. Hist. 239 A 35) can be supplemented to provide a date circa 605, a decade later than that to be

inferred from the Lydian king list of Herodotus. How the

compiler of the Marble determined the date we do not know. More evidence against a down dating of the Corinthian

tyranny is to be found in the fragmentary Athenian archon-list

already mentioned. Among the names listed is a Kypselos ([Ku](j)ae\o[s], Meiggs-Lewis. No. 6.a2). His place on the stone

shows that this Kypselos was Archon in 597 B.C. at the latest. He is the father of the Miltiades who settled in the Thracian Chersonese at the invitation of the Dolonkoi to rule over them

(Herodotus 6.36.1). Kypselos, the father of this Miltiades, was a

grandson of Kypselos, tyrant of Corinth. Miltiades son of

Kypselos went to the Chersonese because he found burdensome the tyranny of Peisistratos; his father Kypselos was Archon a

generation earlier, and two generations earlier still take us back to the tyranny of Kypselos the Corinthian, who reigned, according to Aristotle and those who followed him, from 657 to 627. The mother of the Archon was given to an Athenian by Kypselos the tyrant of Corinth some time in the third quarter of the seventh century B.C. [For the Corinthian-Attic link see J.K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 600-300 B.C. (Oxford 1971) 295].

Had we more time, we could examine the use made by Hellenistic chronographers of the Spartan king lists, in counting back generations from Anaxandridas and Ariston whom they knew from Herodotus (1.67.1) to have been contemporary with Kroisos. But I hope to have convinced you: the chronographers, especially the author of the Parian Marble and Sosibios and

Apollodoros, had a clear notion of events in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; also their methods of dating events were

scholarly in the use of evidence. Of events in the years of the

early Olympiads in the eighth century they were also not

ignorant. Dates were hard to determine, as they are for us. But the chronographers' schemes were not fanciful; indeed, when tested by other evidence, they are seen to be not remote from




the truth. We too see through a glass darkly, but that we see at

all is due in great part to their efforts. Let us also remember the devoted and accurate work of modern scholars. Chronography is one of the unsung successes of modern scholarship. To praise certain scholars above others is invidious, but selectively let us

recall the labours of H. Fynes Clinton nearly two centuries ago (his Fasti Hellenici has to be read cautiously, but it is still

useful). More recently there stand out Felix Jacoby's studies,

Apollodors Chronik in particular; and closer still in time the

scholarship of Alden Mosshammer on the Chronicle of Eusebius.

Times change, but chronographic scholarship endures.

G. L. Huxley

Trinity College Dublin



archaic greece in hellenistic chronography

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