In the absence of internal evidence we are therefore referred to the opinions of antiquity. There is a remark of Gibbon in that part of his Posthumous Writings entitled “Extraits raisonnés de mes Lectures,” which lays down an excellent rule of judgment in matters of chronology. He very justly observes, that the differences of chronologers may be reconciled by the consideration that they reckoned from different æras of the person’s life. The fixing the date from different periods, as from the birth or death, the production of a work,[10] or any other remarkable event of a person’s life, might easily make the difference of a century. “So that we may establish it as a rule of criticism, that where these diversities do not exceed the natural term of human life we ought to think of reconciling, and not of opposing them. There are, indeed, many writers, with respect to Homer, whom it is impossible to conciliate; since they take in so enormous a period as 416 years, from the return of the Heraclidæ A. C. 1104 to the twenty-third Olympiad A. C. 688. But besides that they are of inferior note, the great difference among them leaves the authority of each to stand singly by itself.” This reasoning very much diminishes whatever force might be derived from the authority of names, to the computations of those writers who contend that Hesiod is a century younger than Homer. These are the Latin writers; whose concurrence is however so exact as to induce a belief of their having merely copied from each other. Thus Velleius Paterculus, who wrote his history 30 years after Christ, says that Homer flourished 950 years before his time; that is, before Christ 920; and Pliny about the year 78 computed that Homer lived 1000 years before him; before Christ 920. Paterculus follows Cicero in placing Hesiod 120 years after Homer: Pliny, Porphyry, and Solinus, concur in the order of their ages, and in the interval between them: varying only from ten to twenty or thirty years. But on the plan laid down by Gibbon, this chronology might be reconciled with that of Ephorus, and Varro: who, according to Aulus Gellius, made Hesiod and Homer contemporaries: as did Plutarch and Philostratus.