Chronology and Synchronism
When did "now" begin? Greek historians built scaffolds of Olympiads and archon-lists to pin one people's events against another's.
Before universal calendars, every city counted years by its own officials, so a historian writing about many peoples faced a puzzle: how to say that two distant events happened at the same time. Greek writers answered by anchoring events to shared yardsticks — the four-year Olympiad cycles, lists of Athenian archons or Spartan ephors, and the reckoning of generations. Polybius perfected this, slicing his Mediterranean history into Olympiad years so that wars in Italy, Greece, and the East could be read as one synchronized story. The result was the backbone of historical time itself: a way to fix when, and to line up the many calendars of the ancient world.
Where this idea shows up
7 Greek sourcesWhere to read it
- Catilinae Coniuratio43 BCESallust· Rome
- Noctes Atticae180 CEAulus Gellius· Rome
- Deipnosophistae230 CEAthenaeus of Naucratis· Naucratis