Miscellanies 1.21.117

From the Trojan War to the birth of Homer, according to Philochorus, is a hundred and eighty years, later than the Ionian colonization. Aristarchus, in his Commentaries on Archilochus, says he is placed at the time of the Ionian colonization, which took place a hundred and forty years after the Trojan War. Apollodorus says a hundred years after the Ionian colonization, when Agesilaus son of Doryssus was king of the Spartans, so that Lycurgus the lawgiver, while still young, overlapped with him. Euthymenes in his Chronicles says that he flourished with Hesiod and was born in Chios in the time of Acastus, about two hundred years after the capture of Ilium. Archemachus too, in the third book of his Euboean History, is of this opinion; so that he and Hesiod are younger than the prophet Elisha. And if anyone wishes to follow Crates the grammarian and say that Homer lived about the return of the Heraclidae, eighty years after the capture of Ilium, he will again be found later than Solomon, in whose time Menelaus came to Phoenicia, as has been said. Eratosthenes puts Homer's age after the hundredth year from the capture of Ilium. Theopompus, in the forty-third book of his Philippica, relates that Homer lived five hundred years after those who fought against Ilium. Euphorion, in his work on the Aleuadae, puts him in the time of Gyges, who began to reign from the eighteenth Olympiad, and who, he says, was the first to be called “tyrant.” Sosibius the Spartan, in his Chronological Record, puts Homer in the eighth year of the reign of Charillus son of Polydectes. Charillus reigned sixty-four years, and after him his son Nicander thirty-nine; in the thirty-fourth year of his reign, he says, the first Olympiad was established; so that Homer lived about ninety years before the institution of the Olympic games.