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olympiad| In ancient Greece, the period of four years between each celebration of the Olympic Games. The method of dating by olympiads was used only for literary and historic purposes and was never adopted in everyday life. The first year of the first olympiad was reckoned to be 776 BC. |
| Generally, the ancient Greek states each had their own individual dating systems, which could lead to much confustion. Timaeus of Sicily, a Greek historian (c. 356–260 BC), was the first writer who systematically arranged the dates of events by successive olympiads. The practice was followed by the historians Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others. The last olympiad ended AD 394, when the games were abolished by the emperor Theodosius I the Great. |
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| 1) Tradition puts Homer and the Homeric poems proper back in the ages before chronological history began, and at the same time assigns the purely Cyclic poems to definite authors who are dated from the first Olympiad (776 B. The noble and free citizens of Epidaphne being, as they declare, well satisfied of the faith, valor, wisdom, and divinity of their king, and having, moreover, been eye-witnesses of his late superhuman agility, do think it no more than their duty to invest his brows (in addition to the poetic crown) with the wreath of victory in the footrace -- a wreath which it is evident he must obtain at the celebration of the next Olympiad, and which, therefore, they now give him in advance. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. |