sed, at all events it serves to
remind him of a separate chapter in his chronological researches. Had
Rome stood in as close a relation to Greece as Persia did, one single
chronology would have sufficed for both. Hardly one event in Persian
history has survived for our memory, which is not taken up by the looms
of Greece and interwoven with the general arras and texture of Grecian
history. And from the era of the Consul Paulus Emilius, something of the
same sort takes place between Greece and Rome; and in a partial sense
the same result is renewed as often as the successive assaults occur of
the Roman-destroying power applied to the several members of the
Graeco-Macedonian Empire. But these did not commence until Rome had
existed for half-a-thousand years. And through all that long period,
two-thirds of the entire Roman history up to the Christian era, the two
Chronologies flow absolutely apart.

Consequently, because all chronology is thrown back upon Europe, and
because the pre-Christian Europe is split into two collateral bodies,
and because each of these separate bodies must have a separate head--it
follows that chronology, as a pre-Christian chronology, will, like the
Imperial eagle, be two-headed. Now this accident of chronology, on a
first glance, seems but too likely to confuse and perplex the young
student.

How fortunate, then, it must be thought, and what a duty it imposes upon
the teacher, not to defeat this bounty of accident by false and pedantic
rigour of calculation, that these two heads of the eagle--that head
which looks westward for Roman Chronology, that which looks eastward for
Grecian Chronology--do absolutely coincide as to their nativity. The
birthday of Grecian authentic history everybody agrees to look upon as
fixed to the establishment [the _final_ establishment] of the Olympic
games. And when was _that_? Generally, chronologers have placed this
event just 776 years before Christ. Now will any teacher be so 'peevish'
[as hostess Quickly calls it]--so perversely unaccommodating--as not to
lend herself to the very trivial alteration of one year, just putting
the clock back to 7 instead of 6, even if the absolute certainty of the
6 were made out? But if she _will_ break with her chronologer, 'her
guide, philosopher and friend,' upon so slight a consideration as one
year in three-quarters of a millennium, it then becomes my duty to tell
her that there is no such certainty in the contested number