The chronology of Herodotus is intelligible and consistent with itself: that of Strabo we cannot settle, when he speaks of many different invasions. Nor does his language give us the smallest reason to suppose that he was in possession of any means of determining dates for these early times,—nothing at all calculated to justify the positive chronology which Mr. Clinton deduces from him: compare his Fasti Hellenici, B. C. 635, 629, 617. Strabo says, after affirming that Homer knew both the name and the reality of the Cimmerians (i, p. 6; iii, p. 149),—καὶ γὰρ καθ᾽ Ὅμηρον, ἢ ~πρὸ αὐτοῦ~ μικρὸν, λέγουσι τὴν τῶν Κιμμερίων ἔφοδον γενέσθαι τὴν μέχρι τῆς Αἰολίδος καὶ τῆς Ἰωνίας,—“which places the first appearance of the Cimmerians in Asia Minor a century _at least_ before the Olympiad of Corœbus,” (says Mr. Clinton.) But what means could Strabo have had to chronologize events as happening _at or a little before_ the time of Homer? No date in the Grecian world was so contested, or so indeterminable, as the time of Homer: nor will it do to reason, as Mr. Clinton does, _i. e._ to take the latest date fixed for Homer among many, and then to say that the invasion of the Cimmerians _must_ be _at least_ B. C. 876: thus assuming it as a certainty that, whether the date of Homer be a century earlier or later, the invasion of the Cimmerians must be made to fit it. When Strabo employs such untrustworthy chronological standards, he only shows us—what everything else confirms—that there existed no tests of any value for events of that early date in the Grecian world. Mr. Clinton announces this ante-Homeric calculation as a chronological certainty: “The Cimmerians first appeared in Asia Minor about a century before B. C. 776. An irruption is _recorded_ in B. C. 782. Their last inroad was in B. C. 635. The settlement of Ambrôn (the Milesian, at Sinôpê) may be placed at about B. C. 782, twenty-six years before the era assigned to (the Milesian or Sinôpic settlement of) Trapezus.” On what authority does Mr. Clinton assert that a Cimmerian irruption was _recorded_ in B. C. 782? Simply on the following passage of Orosius, which he cites at B. C. 635: “Anno ante urbem conditam tricesimo,—Tunc etiam _Amazonum gentis et Cimmeriorum_ in Asiam repentinus incursus plurimum diu lateque vastationem et stragem intulit.” If this authority of Orosius is to be trusted, we ought to say that the invasion of the Amazons was a _recorded_ fact. To treat a fact mentioned in Orosius, an author of the fourth century after Christ, and referred to B. C. 782, as a _recorded_ fact, confounds the most important boundary-lines in regard to the appreciation of historical evidence.