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ANCIENT GREEK CHRONOGRAPHY1 developed when historians began to ask for temporal distances between past events and themselves. As long as there was no fixed point of reference, i.e. a common era, each event had to be located in time in relation to other events, and this relation was expressed by intervals in years or generations. Such a method to bridge the time span into the past by adding intervals between events can be labeled a "diastematic" system of dating. It was the Italian historian Santo Mazzarino2 who derived it from the Greek word diastematikós-proceeding by intervals.
A good example of the construction of such a diastematic chronology by joining intervals between important events and arranging a sequence of periods given by years can be seen in the famous fragment from the Chronographiai by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276/3-194/1 B.C.):3
With his chronography, Eratosthenes reached a new level of sophistication in re-arranging recognized dates, finding new ones and setting the standard for his followers. His kanones ("systems of chronology"), as they were called by Dionysius of Halikarnassus,4 proved to be extremely successful in that they were widely accepted in antiquity and acknowledged by his followers, e.g. Apollodorus. Down to the present, much of our chronology draws on his calculations. His dates from Xerxes onwards are corroborated by other evidence and easily convertible into years B.C.; but his fragment 1a is the earliest source that allows us to calculate the date for the first recorded Olympic games, which we generally treat as the first secure date in Greek history.5
Eratosthenes' chronography is the result of several complex calculations and considerations based on methods developed since the end of the fifth century B.C. Besides the computation of diachronic distances, ancient historians started then to fix events and persons in synchronic relations to each other. This necessity arose when two or more dating systems from different poleis or cultural backgrounds were involved and had to be made comparable and understandable to the whole GrecoRoman world. So Thucydides (2.2) found his famous date for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War or Timaeus synchronized the Spartan kings and ephors, Athenian archons, Argive priestesses of Hera, and Olympic victors. Such famous synchronisms, however, as the foundation of Rome and Carthage in the same...