chronological error

Max Müller attributes the chronological error neither to Herodotus nor to the Egyptian scribes who supplied him with information, but to Hecataeus of Miletus, whose work Herodotus used—“an Egyptian would not have made such a chronological blunder.”

As the hour of her first unclosing the brilliancy of her eyes, in a world which all the court poets profess must be left in darkness without them, so the regular periods by which the bud advances to the bloom, and the bloom matures into ripened loveliness, are registered with an annual activity of verse, prose, and prostration, that precludes all chronological error.

The chronological error here amounts to sixty or seventy years.

So that although they sang the captain's praises to their friends, speaking highly of his personal attractions, crediting him with a brave and generous heart, testifying to his riches, as if they managed his exchequer, and vaguely referring to certain influential patronage which would put him, sooner or later, in the way of the distinctions of a general, they certainly never forgave him his chronological error.

Another friend of his once said that Funston was a sixteenth-century hero, born four hundred years or so too late, who had ever since been seeking to remedy the chronological error of his birth.