Problems in Greek historyMahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
History
Problems in Greek history
Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Greece -- Historiography; Greece -- History
I will now sum up the results of this long discussion. When we emerge
into the light of Greek history, we find the venerable Olympian games
long established, and most of their details referred to mythical
antiquity. We find no list of victors recognised by the early
historians, and we have the strongest negative evidence that no such
list existed in the days of Thucydides. Nevertheless about 580 B.C. the
feast was more strictly regulated, and the victors' names recorded,
perhaps regularly, in inscriptions; from 540 B.C. onward the practice of
dedicating athlete statues with inscriptions was introduced, though not
for every victor. About 500 B.C. there were many inscriptions (that of
Hiero is still extant), and there was evidence from which to write the
history of the festival; but this was never done till the time of the
archæologist and rhetorician Hippias, who was a native of Elis, with
influence and popularity there, and who even placed new inscriptions on
old votive offerings. This man (probably in 376 B.C.) constructed the
whole history of the feast, partly from the evidence before him, partly
from the analogy of other feasts. He fixed the commencement of his list,
after the manner of the chronologers of his day, by the date of the
mythical founder. Hence neither the names nor the dates found in
Eusebius' copy of the register for the first fifty Olympiads are to be
accepted as genuine, unless they are corroborated by other evidence.
We have not even, as yet, the corroborative evidence of any other Greek
inscriptions of the seventh or eighth centuries B.C. Till some such
records, or fragments of such records, are found, we are not entitled to
assume that the Greeks began to use writing upon stone for any records
at such a date as 776 B.C. That great storehouse of old civilization,
the Acropolis of Athens, has yielded us nothing of the kind; and even if
we admit that the annual archons were noted down since 683 B.C. (which
is far from certain), is not the further step to nearly a century
earlier completely unwarrantable?
I have reserved till now a passage in Aristotle's fragments (594) on the
Olympian festival, which may help the still unconvinced reader to
estimate the value of his opinion, on the authenticity of the Register.
Aristotle is commonly spoken of as having made critical researches upon
this question: here is _the only specimen_ left to us:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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