[13] tells us:  he lived in the 105th Olympiad, and was derided by Plato for his Ignorance.  This Breviary seems to have contained nothing more than a short account of the Victors in every Olympiad.  Then [14] Ephorus, the disciple of Isocrates, formed a Chronological History of Greece, beginning with the Return of the Heraclides into Peloponnesus, and ending with the Siege of Perinthus, in the twentieth year of Philip the father of Alexander the great, that is, eleven years before the fall of the Persian Empire:  but [15] he digested things by Generations, and the reckoning by the Olympiads, or by any other AEra, was not yet in use among the Greeks.  The Arundelian Marbles were composed sixty years after the death of Alexander the great (An. 4. Olymp. 128.) and yet mention not the Olympiads, nor any other standing AEra, but reckon backwards from the time then present.  But Chronology was now reduced to a reckoning by Years; and in the next Olympiad Timaeus Siculus improved it:  for he wrote a History in Several books, down to his own times, according to the Olympiads; comparing the Ephori, the Kings of Sparta, the Archons of Athens, and the Priestesses of Argos with the Olympic Victors, so as to make the Olympiads, and the Genealogies and Successions of Kings and Priestesses, and the Poetical Histories suit with one another, according to the best of his judgment:  and where he left off, Polybius began, and carried on the History. Eratosthenes wrote above an hundred years after the death of Alexander the great:  He was followed by Apollodorus; and these two have been followed ever since by Chronologers.

But how uncertain their Chronology is, and how doubtful it was reputed by the Greeks of those times, may be understood by these passages of Plutarch. Some reckon Lycurgus__, saith he, [16] contemporary to Iphitus_, and to have been his companion in ordering the Olympic festivals, amongst whom was Aristotle the Philosopher; arguing from the Olympic Disc, which had the name of Lycurgus upon it.  Others supputing the times by the Kings of Lacedaemon, as Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, affirm that he was not a few years older than the first Olympiad._ He began to flourish in the 17th or 18th Olympiad, and at length Aristotle made him as old as the first Olympiad; and so did Epaminondas, as he is cited by AElian and Plutarch:  and then Eratosthenes, Apollodorus, and their followers, made him above an hundred years older.

And in another place Plutarch [17] tells us:  The Congress of Solon_ with Croesus, some think they can confute by Chronology.  But a History so illustrious, and verified by so many witnesses, and which is more, so agreeable to the manners of Solon, and worthy of the greatness of his mind, and of his wisdom, I cannot persuade my self to reject because of some Chronological Canons, as they call them, which hundreds of authors correcting, have not yet been able to constitute any thing certain, in which they could agree amongst themselves, about repugnancies._