determined only with reference to astronomical phenomena. As Galen, in the
second centuryCE, aptly explained:
If all the nations had the same [months], Hippocrates would not have referred to
Arcturus and the Pleiades and Sirius and the equinoxes and solstices, but he
would have been content to state that such and such conditions occurred in the
makeup of the environment at the beginning of [the month] Dios, naming [the
month] according to the Macedonians if that was the state of affairs [i.e. if all
nations used Macedonian months]. But since in fact a reference to Dios is clear
only to the Macedonians, but not to the Athenians and the rest of mankind,
whereas Hippocrates intended to be of service to people from all nations, it was
better for him to record just the equinox without mentioning in which month.^105The point is well made, even though Galen does not mention that anyway a
lunar calendar would not have been suited for dating Hippocrates’mainly
seasonalmedical phenomena; moreover, he omits referring to the irregularity
of Greek lunar calendars, which should have been a further reason for not
using them.^106 But whilst this explains Hippocrates’preference for astronomi-
cal dates, which can be reasonably precise, it does not go far enough to explain
the tendency of Herodotus and Thucydides to avoid any precise form of
dating altogether. Their apparent lack of interest in precise dating suggests,
more fundamentally, a very different view of chronology from ours: their
conception of the past was certainly not dependent on a calendar or a
calendar-based chronology.^107
Later historians make more use of civil calendar dates, although—much to
the annoyance of modern scholars—these dated events remained relatively
rare. Some use the Egyptian or Julian calendars, which both provided long-
term time frames that were stable and commonly known; but they also give
dates according to Greek and other civil calendars, which could be (at the
time, and still to this date) historically uninformative and sometimes plainly
confusing.^108 The absolute chronology afforded by astronomical calendars,
(^105) Galen,InHippocratis Librum Primum Epidemarium Commentarii3. 19 (ed. Kühn,
xvii/1), translation cited from A. Jones (2007) 151–2.
(^106) These omissions were perhaps deliberately intended by Galen so as to avoid confusion,
because in his own day the Macedonian calendar (of Asia Minor and the Near East), which he
uses as an example, had become 107 fixed and modelled on the Julian, solar calendar (see Ch. 5).
See Bouvier loc. cit., who also points out (p. 125 n. 38) that in one passage Herodotus (2. 4)
notes the deficiencies of the Greek calendars, but fails to draw the implications this may have had
for historical writing. The lack of an absolute chronological framework was clearly not an issue to
him as a historian.
(^108) Particularly when different civil calendars appear to have been simultaneously used, e.g. in
Josephus (see Stern 2001: 34–8). Grafton and Swerdlow (1988) show that the civil dates of past
historical events were normally reconstructed by ancient historians (rather than retrieved from
records orfirm traditions). These reconstructions were based either on their assumptions (often
erroneous) about the calendars, or on the dates of the annual commemoration of these events in
the local civil calendars (I am grateful to Robert Parker for referring me to this important article).
Calendars of AncientGreece 55