Instructive and important as this chronology now ap pears, it might have been differently accounted by the ancients. The sources of information which they pos sessed, of many of which we have certainly never heard, might have been so multifarious, and so authentic, as to have rendered this chronicle, in. their estimation, alto gether jejune, contemptible, and commonplace. With an ancient writer, what weight could a common regis ter of events possess, unsupported by reasons, and com piled by a nameless cotemporary ? Two or three thou sand years hence, how precious would a school chrono logy of our times be accounted ; and yet which of our present historians would deign to quote such a work ? It is no inconsiderable addition to the weight of this remark, that by the confession of its adversaries, the notices on the marble are generally the same with those contained in the surviving writings of that period.
This solution, however, involves a concession by no means necessary. The marbles, for aught we know, may have been frequently quoted by the ancients. No thing is more common with them than to quote from authors without naming them. Thus St Paul abounds in citations from the Old Testament, and even from the heathen writings, without mentioning the authors ; and why may not the Parian marble have been quoted in simi lar silence ? Besides, who can tell whether it has not been quoted by name ? Unfortunately for us, not one sys tem of ancient chronology now exists, except in mutila 'ed fragments: even few histories have escaped entire, and many have utterly perished ; so that nothing positive can be said as to the particular references contained in these works. A Roman calendar, engraved on marble, was lately dug up at Preneste, which had been composed by Verrius Flaccus, and placed by that learned person in the most conspicuous part of the town, for the use of the public. The hemicyclium is indeed, by great good fortune, mentioned in a single passage of Suetonius ; but if this passage, like many others, had been lost, would the fragments be the less ancient on that account ? and what strange logic would it be to pronounce them absolutely unnoticed, because not mentioned by any writer ex tant? But even on the supposition that the marble was neither consulted, nor so much as heard of by any of the ancient writers, still we see no reason why it should be declared spurious. Like many other noble monuments, it might have sunk into the deepest obscurity soon af ter its erection. It might have been, at an early period, suddenly lost and forgotten amid the terrors of hostile invasion : it might have been involved in the conflagra tion and ruins of a building : it might have been trans ported to grace some villa in a sequestered retreat, to be gazed at only by untutored rustics : it might even have owed its early misfortune to an excessive solicitude for its preservation, and, like the works of the great philoso phi r, have been deposited, on a particular emergency, in some unfrequented recess, there gradually to sink into complete oblivion.
Gth, The objection, that some of the facts seem to have been taken from authors of a later date, is the only one of all the time which bears any resemblance to a direct argument against the authenticity of the marble, and yet to us it appears one of the weakest. For, in the first place, it is founded on the gratuitous assumption, that the marble is coeval with its last epoch ; and, in the second, the instances adduced in support of it are ex tremely questionable. The only example deserving the least notice, is that relative to the order of the cities. " The names of six," says the objector, " and, if the lacunae are properly supplied, the names of twelve cities appear to have been engraved on the marble, exactly as we find them in tElian's Various History. But there is not any imaginable reason for this particular arrange ment. It does not correspond with the time of their foundation, with their situation in Ionia, with their rela tive importance, or with the order in which they are placed by other eminent historians." Mr Robertson then calculates, that the chance of six names being placed by two authors in the same order, is as 1 to 720 ; of 12 names, as 1 to 479,001,600 ; and, consequently, that the compiler of the chronicle has transcribed them from On this argument we shall just remark, that with the same propriety, we might assert that Allian copied the inscription, though without naming it ; a practice for which he is notorious. But restoring to Mr Robertson his own weapon, the advocates of the marble have no reason to apprehend much execution from it. For grant ing that the lacunR are properly supplied, a datum by no means of the rank of an axiom, and allowing that the arrangement of the 12 cities corresponds exactly with that of ,Elian, may not both Allian and the chronologer have borrowed the order from some common document ? Paterculus and Pausanias, in enumerating the same 12 cities, agree in the arrangement of the five, perhaps of the six, last ; but can it be believed, that Pausanias, writing on the affairs of Greece, would go to steal from Paterculus, an obscure foreign writer, half a poor ar rangement ? It is infinitely more probable, that in both cases the arrangement was transcribed from some com mon authority ; and we may safely affirm, with the same confidence, that no forger would incur the great pro bability of detection, merely to save himself the mecha nical trouble of transposing the names.