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This destruction befell the city of Jerusalem when Marcus Agrippa and Caninius Gallus were consuls of Rome on the hundred eighty and fifth olympiad, on the third month, on the solemnity of the fast, as if a periodical revolution of calamities had returned since that which befell the Jews under Pompey; for the Jews were taken by him on the same day, and this was after twenty-seven years' time.
The games were celebrated after the completion of every fourth year, this four year period being called an "Olympiad," and used as the basis of the chronology of Greece, the first Olympiad dating from the revival of the games in 884 B.C. These games at first lasted but a single day, but were extended until they occupied five days.
Diodorus Siculus writes thus respecting it: 'In the first year of the 102d Olympiad, Alcisthenes being Archon of Athens, several prodigies announced the approaching humiliation of the Lacedæmonians; a blazing torch of extraordinary size, which was compared to a flaming beam, was seen during several nights. Guillemin, from whose interesting work on Comets I have translated the above passage, remarks that this same comet was regarded by the ancients as having not merely presaged but produced the earthquakes which caused the towns of Helice and Bura to be submerged.
Taroutius performed his task, and after considering the things done and suffered by Romulus, the length of his life, the manner of his death, and all such like matters, he confidently and boldly asserted that Romulus was conceived by his mother in the first year of the second Olympiad, at the third hour of the twenty-third day of the month which is called in the Egyptian calendar Choiac, at which time there was a total eclipse of the sun.
It is fair to suppose that the Helleno-Dorian conquest must have begun at least a century before the first Olympiad; for otherwise the geographical limits of the various Greek races would not have been so completely established as we find them to have been at that date.
For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit, but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course, their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative projections upon the past of the culture of the writer's own period or periods.
Of all the philosophers of antiquity, Aristotle was one of the most celebrated; and in every seat of learning, his name, even at this day, is held in esteem. He was son of Nicomachus, a physician, and friend of Amyntas, king of Macedonia, and was descended from Machaon, son of Æsculapius. He was born at Stagira, a city of Macedonia, in the first year of the 99th Olympiad.
The first Olympiad is generally considered as corresponding with the year 776 B.C. The Pythian games were celebrated in the vicinity of Delphi, the Isthmian on the Corinthian isthmus, the Nemean at Nemea, a city of Argolis. The exercises in these games were of five sorts: running, leaping, wrestling, throwing the quoit, and hurling the javelin, or boxing.
On several occasions the Olympic games became occasions of great historical interest. One of these was the ninetieth Olympiad, of 420 B.C., which took place during the peace between Athens and Sparta, in the Peloponnesian war Athens having been excluded from the two preceding ones.
The invention of eras was indispensable to this end. The earliest definite time for the dating of events was established at Babylon, the era of Nabonassar, 747 B.C. The Greeks, from about 300 B.C., dated events from the first recorded victory at the Olympic games, 776 B.C. These games occurred every fourth year. Each Olympiad was thus a period of four years.
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