itself had many diverse calendars and civil years, with each state maintaining its
own annual calendar, beginning at various points of the natural year, and marking
the year in its own unique manner with the names of local officials.^41 It was a press-
ing need in historiography to find ways of producing a coherent narrative that
could integrate the different time frames of the different participants.
Classicists regularly first encounter this issue when they get to the beginning of
the second book of Thucydides, where the historian faces the problem of giving a
Panhellenically comprehensible beginning point for the Archidamian War in “431
b.c.e.”^42 This is a passage that no discussion of synchronism ever omits (2.2.1):
Tevssara me;n ga;r kai; devka e[th ejnevmeinan aiJ triakontouvtei" spondai; ai}
ejgevnonto metÆ Eujboiva" a{lwsin: tw'/ de; pevmptw/ kai; dekavtw/ e{tei, ejpi; Crusivdo"
ejn ÒArgei tovte penthvkonta duoi'n devonta e[th iJerwmevnh" kai; Aijnhsivou
ejfovrou ejn Spavrth/ kai; Puqodwvrou e[ti duvo mh'na" a[rconto" ÆAqhnaivoi",
meta; th;n ejn Poteidaiva/ mavchn mhni; e{ktw/ kai; a{ma h\ri ajrcomevnw/ Qhbaivwn
a[ndre" ojlivgw/ pleivou" triakosivwn (hJgou'nto de; aujtw'n boiwtarcou'nte"
Puqavggelov" te oJ Fuleivdou kai; Dievmporo" oJ ÆOnhtorivdou) ejsh'lqon peri;
prw'ton u{pnon xu;n o{ploi" ej" Plavtaian th'" Boiwtiva" ou\san ÆAqhnaivwn
xummacivda.
The thirty years’ truce that took place after the recapture of Euboea lasted
for fourteen years. In the fifteenth year, when Chrysis was then in her forty-
eighth year as priestess in Argos and Aenesias was ephor in Sparta and Pytho-
dorus was archon for the Athenians with still two months to go, in the sixth
month after the battle at Potidaea and just as spring was beginning, a little
over three hundred men of Thebes under the command of the Boeotarchs
Pythangelus son of Phylides and Diemporus son of Onetorides entered
around first sleep with their weapons into Plataea, a city of Boeotia that
was an ally of the Athenians.Here Thucydides is no doubt using as his departure point the first Panhellenic
work of synchrony in the Greek world, the work of Hellanicus of Lesbos on the
priestesses of Hera at Argos. Hellanicus’s work was not strictly or systematically
synchronistic in the manner of the later chronological works we shall be examin-
ing shortly, in that he did not give parallel series of eponymous officials for each
year but attached “facts and events to a certain name and a certain year in the list
of the priestesses of Hera at Argos, and add[ed] for the sake of convenience syn-
chronisms with, or relations to, a great epochal event.”^43 It was Thucydides’ ini-
tiative, in other words, to key in the names of the Spartan ephor and Athenian
First Instruments of Greek Synchronism. 17