History in later antiquity was chiefly a branch of _belles lettres_ and made no great effort after exactness. As a rule it contented itself with the date at which a man "flourished," a very rough conception, conventionally fixed either by the time when he did his most memorable work or the year when he reached the age of forty. The year commonly assigned to Euripides' birth is a good instance of ancient method in these things. The system of chronology was badly confused. In the first place there was no generally accepted era from which to date; and even if there had been, the numerical system, before the invention of Arabic ciphers, was as confused as English spelling is at the present day, and made it hard to do the simplest sums. So the ordinary educational plan was to group events together in some scheme that might not be quite exact but was calculated to have some symbolic interest and to stay in the memory. For instance, the three great tragedians were grouped together round the Battle of Salamis, the great triumph of the Persian Wars in 480 B.C. Aeschylus fought among the heavy-armed infantry, Sophocles danced in a choir of boys to celebrate the victory, and Euripides was born in Salamis on the day of the battle. We do not know the origin of this pleasant fable; but we have another date given in a very ancient chronicle called the _Parian Marble_, which was found in the island of Paros in the seventeenth century and was composed in the year 264 B.C. It puts the birth of Euripides in 484 B.C., and since we cannot find any reason why this year should be invented, and since the _Marble_ is the oldest witness now extant, we shall probably do well provisionally to accept its statement. In some of the MSS. which preserve Euripides' plays there are "scholia" or ancient traditional commentaries written round the margin. A few of the oldest notes in them come from Alexandrian scholars who lived in the second century B.C. Others date from Roman times, in the first few centuries of the Christian era; others from the eleventh century and even later. And among them there is a quite ancient document called _Life and Race of Euripides_. It is anonymous and shapeless. Sentences may have been added or omitted by the various people who at different times have owned or copied the MSS. But we can see that it is derived from early sources, and notably from a "Life" which was written by one Satyrus, a writer of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian school, towards the end of the third century B.C. Fragments from the same source have been detected in the Latin authors Varro and Gellius; and it has influenced the biographical notice in the ancient Greek lexicon of Suidas (tenth century A.D.). Suidas used also another earlier and better source, the _Attic Chronicle_ of Philochorus.