Attic Calendar - Dating Long Range Events

Dating Long Range Events

The modern calendar, as well as regulating the immediate year, is part of a system of chronology that allows events to be dated far into the future and the past. So a given date includes day, month and year.

By contrast, the Attic calendar had little interest in ordering the sequence of years. As in most Greek cities, the name of one of the yearly magistrates, at Athens known as the eponymous archon, was used to identify the year in relation to others. That is to say, the sequence of years was matched to a list of names that could be consulted. Instead of citing a numbered year, one could locate a year in time by saying that some event occurred "when X. was archon." This did allow the years to be ordered back in time for a number of generations into the past, but there was no way of dating forward beyond ordinary human reckoning (as in expressions such as "Ten years from now").

There was for instance no use of a century divided into decades. A four year cycle was important which must have helped structure a sense of the passing years: at Athens the festival of the Panathenaia was celebrated on a grander scale every fourth year as the Great Panathenaia. But this was not used as the basis of a dating system.

As both narrowly local and cyclical in focus then, the calendar did not provide a means for dating events in a panhellenically (internationally) comprehensible way. A dating system using the four-yearly Olympiads was devised by the Greek Sicilian historian Timaeus (born c.350 BC) as a tool for the historical research, but it was probably never important on a local level.