So then a little after the death of Alexander the great, they began to set down the Generations, Reigns and Successions, in numbers of years, and by putting Reigns and Successions equipollent to Generations, and three Generations to an hundred or an hundred and twenty years (as appears by their Chronology) they have made the Antiquities of Greece three or four hundred years older than the truth. And this was the original of the Technical Chronology of the Greeks. Eratosthenes wrote about an hundred years after the death of Alexander the great: He was followed by Apollodorus, and these two have been followed ever since by Chronologers.

But how uncertain their Chronology is, and how doubtful it was reputed by the Greeks of those times, may be understood by these passages of Plutarch. Some reckon, saith he, [1] Lycurgus _contemporary to Iphitus, and to have been his companion in ordering the Olympic festivals: amongst whom was Aristotle the Philosopher, arguing from the Olympic Disc, which had the name of Lycurgus upon it. Others supputing the times by the succession of the Kings of the Lacedæmonians, as Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, affirm that he was not a few years older than the first Olympiad._ First Aristotle and some others made him as old as the first Olympiad; then Eratosthenes, Apollodorus, and some others made him above an hundred years older: and in another place Plutarch [2] tells us: _The congress of Solon with Croesus, some think they can confute by Chronology. But an history so illustrious, and verified by so many witnesses, and (which is more) so agreeable to the manners of Solon, and so worthy of the greatness of his mind and of his wisdom, I cannot persuade my self to reject because of some Chronological Canons, as they call them: which hundreds of authors correcting, have not yet been able to constitute any thing certain, in which they could agree among themselves, about repugnancies_. It seems the Chronologers had made the Legislature of Solon too ancient to consist with that Congress.

For reconciling such repugnancies, Chronologers have sometimes doubled the persons of men. So when the Poets had changed Io the daughter of Inachus into the Egyptian Isis, Chronologers made her husband Osiris or Bacchus and his mistress Ariadne as old as Io, and so feigned that there were two Ariadnes, one the mistress of Bacchus, and the other the mistress of Theseus, and two Minos's their fathers, and a younger Io the daughter of Jasus, writing Jasus corruptly for Inachus. And so they have made two Pandions, and two Erechtheus's, giving the name of Erechthonius to the first; Homer calls the first, Erechtheus: and by such corruptions they have exceedingly perplexed Ancient History.

And as for the Chronology of the Latines, that is still more uncertain. Plutarch represents great uncertainties in the Originals of Rome: and so doth Servius. The old records of the Latines were burnt by the Gauls, sixty and four years before the death of Alexander the great; and Quintus Fabius Pictor, the oldest historian of the Latines, lived an hundred years later than that King.

In Sacred History, the Assyrian Empire began with Pul and Tiglathpilaser, and lasted about 170 years. And accordingly Herodotus hath made Semiramis only five generations, or about 166 years older than Nitocris, the mother of the last King of Babylon. But Ctesias hath made Semiramis 1500 years older than Nitocris, and feigned a long series of Kings of Assyria, whose names are not Assyrian, nor have any affinity with the Assyrian names in Scripture.

The Priests of Egypt told Herodotus, that Menes built Memphis and the sumptuous temple of Vulcan, in that City: and that Rhampsinitus, Mœris, Asychis and Psammiticus added magnificent porticos to that temple. And it is not likely that Memphis could be famous, before Homer's days who doth not mention it, or that a temple could be above two or three hundred years in building. The Reign of Psammiticus began about 655 years before Christ, and I place the founding of this temple by Menes about 257 years earlier: but the Priests of Egypt had so magnified their Antiquities before the days of Herodotus, as to tell him that from Menes to Mœris (who reigned 200 years before Psammiticus) there were 330 Kings, whose Reigns took up as many Ages, that is eleven thousand years, and had filled up the interval with feigned Kings, who had done nothing. And before the days of Diodorus Siculus they had raised their Antiquities so much higher, as to place six, eight, or ten new Reigns of Kings between those Kings, whom they had represented to Herodotus to succeed one another immediately.

In the Kingdom of Sicyon, Chronologers have split Apis Epaphus or Epopeus into two Kings, whom they call Apis and Epopeus, and between them have inserted eleven or twelve feigned names of Kings who did nothing, and thereby they have made its Founder Ægialeus, three hundred years older than his brother Phoroneus. Some have made the Kings of Germany as old as the Flood: and yet before the use of letters, the names and actions of men could scarce be remembred above eighty or an hundred years after their deaths: and therefore I admit no Chronology of things done in Europe, above eighty years before Cadmus brought letters into Europe; none, of things done in Germany, before the rise of the Roman Empire.

Now since Eratosthenes and Apollodorus computed the times by the Reigns of the Kings of Sparta, and (as appears by their Chronology still followed) have made the seventeen Reigns of these Kings in both Races, between the Return of the Heraclides into Peloponnesus and the Battel of Thermopylæ, take up 622 years, which is after the rate of 36½ years to a Reign, and yet a Race of seventeen Kings of that length is no where to be met with in all true History, and Kings at a moderate reckoning Reign but 18 or 20 years a-piece one with another: I have stated the time of the return of the Heraclides by the last way of reckoning, placing it about 340 years before the Battel of Thermopylæ. And making the Taking of Troy eighty years older than that Return, according to Thucydides, and the Argonautic Expedition a Generation older than the Trojan War, and the Wars of Sesostris in Thrace and death of Ino the daughter of Cadmus a Generation older than that Expedition: I have drawn up the following Chronological Table, so as to make Chronology suit with the Course of Nature, with Astronomy, with Sacred History, with Herodotus the Father of History, and with it self; without the many repugnancies complained of by Plutarch. I do not pretend to be exact to a year: there may be Errors of five or ten years, and sometimes twenty, and not much above.

* * * * *

A SHORT

CHRONICLE

FROM THE _First Memory of things in Europe to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the great._

The Times are set down in years before Christ.

The Canaanites who fled from Joshua, retired in great numbers into Egypt, and there conquered Timaus, Thamus, or Thammuz King of the lower Egypt, and reigned there under their Kings Salatis, Bœon, Apachnas, Apophis, Janias, Assis, &c. untill the days of Eli and Samuel. They fed on flesh, and sacrificed men after the manner of the Phœnicians, and were called Shepherds by the Egyptians, who lived only on the fruits of the earth, and abominated flesh-eaters. The upper parts of Egypt were in those days under many Kings, Reigning at Coptos, Thebes, This, Elephantis, and other Places, which by conquering one another grew by degrees into one Kingdom, over which Misphragmuthosis Reigned in the days of Eli.

In the year before Christ 1125 Mephres Reigned over the upper Egypt from Syene to Heliopolis, and his Successor Misphragmuthosis made a lasting war upon the Shepherds soon after, and caused many of them to fly into Palestine, Idumæa, Syria, and Libya; and under Lelex, Æzeus, Inachus, Pelasgus, Æolus the first, Cecrops, and other Captains, into Greece. Before those days Greece and all Europe was peopled by wandring Cimmerians, and Scythians from the backside of the Euxine Sea, who lived a rambling wild sort of life, like the Tartars in the northern parts of Asia. Of their Race was Ogyges, in whose days these Egyptian strangers came into Greece. The rest of the Shepherds were shut up by Misphragmuthosis, in a part of the lower Egypt called Abaris or Pelusium.

In the year 1100 the Philistims, strengthned by the access of the Shepherds, conquer Israel, and take the Ark. Samuel judges Israel.

1085. Hæmon the son of Pelasgus Reigns in Thessaly.

1080. Lycaon the son of Pelasgus builds Lycosura; Phoroneus the son of Inachus, Phoronicum, afterwards called Argos; Ægialeus the brother of Phoroneus and son of Inachus, Ægialeum, afterwards called Sicyon: and these were the oldest towns in Peloponnesus. 'Till then they built only single houses scattered up and down in the fields. About the same time Cecrops built Cecropia in Attica, afterwards called Athens; and Eleusine, the son of Ogyges, built Eleusis. And these towns gave a beginning to the Kingdoms of the Arcadians, Argives, Sicyons, Athenians, Eleusinians, &c. Deucalion flourishes.