Unfortunately the genealogy of Iphitus is not extant; in Pausanias' day he already had three different fathers assigned to him (v. 4, 6.); and we cannot, therefore, follow out the _a priori_ scheme of Hippias in this instance; but I will illustrate it by another, which still plays a prominent figure in our histories of Greece--I mean the chronology of the Sicilian and Italian colonies, as given by Thucydides in his sixth book. He speaks with considerable precision of events in the latter half of the eighth century B.C.; he even speaks of an event which happened 300 years before the arrival of the Greeks in Sicily. As Thucydides was not inspired, he must have drawn these things from some authority; as he mentions no state documents it has been conjectured that his source was here the work of Antiochus of Syracuse. This man was evidently an antiquarian no wiser or more scientific than his fellows; Thucydides betrays their method by dating all the foundations _downwards_ from that of Syracuse. Antiochus was obliged to admit the priority of Naxos, but grants it only one year; then he starts from his fixed era. But how was the date of the foundation of Syracuse determined? Not, so far as we know, from city registers and careful computations of years backward from the fifth century. Such an assumption is to my mind chimerical, and the source of many illusions. The foundation of Syracuse was determined as to date by its founder, Archias, _being the tenth from Temenos_. The return of the Herakleidæ was placed before the middle of the eleventh century B.C.; hence Archias would fall below the middle of the eighth century. The usual date of Pheidon of Argos, 747 B.C., was fixed in the same way by his being the tenth Temenid, and hence the 8th Ol. was set down as the _an-Olympiad_ celebrated by him. He should probably, as I have before argued, be brought down nearly a century (to 670 B.C.) in date.
I will now sum up the results of this long discussion. When we emerge into the light of Greek history, we find the venerable Olympian games long established, and most of their details referred to mythical antiquity. We find no list of victors recognised by the early historians, and we have the strongest negative evidence that no such list existed in the days of Thucydides. Nevertheless about 580 B.C. the feast was more strictly regulated, and the victors' names recorded, perhaps regularly, in inscriptions; from 540 B.C. onward the practice of dedicating athlete statues with inscriptions was introduced, though not for every victor. About 500 B.C. there were many inscriptions (that of Hiero is still extant), and there was evidence from which to write the history of the festival; but this was never done till the time of the archæologist and rhetorician Hippias, who was a native of Elis, with influence and popularity there, and who even placed new inscriptions on old votive offerings. This man (probably in 376 B.C.) constructed the whole history of the feast, partly from the evidence before him, partly from the analogy of other feasts. He fixed the commencement of his list, after the manner of the chronologers of his day, by the date of the mythical founder. Hence neither the names nor the dates found in Eusebius' copy of the register for the first fifty Olympiads are to be accepted as genuine, unless they are corroborated by other evidence.