So lets say I want to say the Peloponnesian war ended in 404 BCE. The date format I'm given on my calendar converter is Ol.94.1 . How is this read? What is the Ol for and what is the significance or relation of the numbers?
Maybe this is a more suited question for a Chronologist or whatever the field is that deciphers ancient calendars and dates but I appreciate any help I can get. Thank you.
That means the 1st year of the 94th Olympiad. The Olympiad is the four-year cycle between the Olympic Games, so the Games themselves fell on the 1st year of each cycle. Ol.94.2, .3, and .4 would then be 403, 402, and 401 BC, and the cycle starts over again with Ol.95.1 in 400 BC.
The "ancient Greeks" were never really a unified group of people so each city had its own particular calendar and religious celebrations. The Athenian one is the best-known, just because everything from Athens is better-known than everywhere else, but it certainly wasn't the only calendar and even for the Greeks themselves it was difficult to synchronize all these different calendar systems. Sometimes they used dates that were common to everyone in the Greek world - in this case, the cycle of the Olympic Games.
According to their calculations the first Olympics took place in 776 BC. A list of winners (i.e. the winner of the most prestigious part of the games, the foot race or stadion) was kept and displayed at Olympia, going all the way back to the first winner, Koroibos. 776 BC was rather far in the past though, almost the "Greek dark ages", so it's possible that the earliest records were a bit imaginary/mythological. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Olympics really did start int he 8th century BC, and 776 BC might not have really been the very first one, but that was the date later Greek authors agreed on.
The Greeks didn't always use the Olympiad as a dating system but it became popular in the late classical and into the Hellenistic period. If ancient Greek historians wanted to give a concordant date for something that happened in, say, Athenian and Spartan history, what date could they use? Like the Romans later did, the Athenians and Spartans typically dated their years by the names of the rulers of the city for that year, the archons in Athens and the ephors in Sparta. The archon in 404 BC was Alexias and the ephor was Archytas. Those names probably wouldn't have meant much to someone who wasn't from Athens or Sparta, but everyone would have understood they ruled in the first year of the 94th Olympiad.
Of course, 776 BC is the date on *our* calendar, so really we're adding another layer of calendar synchronization whenever we mention BC/AD dates. Incidentally, 2021 is the first year of the 700th Olympiad, so it's kind of neat that the 2020 Olympics were postponed until this year.
Source:
Alan Samuel, Greek and Roman Chronology (Munich, 1972)
This is ridiculously helpful. (And topical given the olympics rn) thank you so much