To Autolycus 3.16

Now I wish, God permitting, to show you more precisely the matter of chronology, so that you may know that our teaching is not recent or mythical, but older and truer than all the poets and writers, who wrote about what they could not know. Some said that the world is uncreated and went on into infinity; others said it was created and that 153,075 years have already passed. This is what Apollonius the Egyptian relates. And Plato, who is thought to have been the wisest of the Greeks, what nonsense he came to! In the work he calls the Republic it is written in so many words: “For how, if these things had remained for all time as they are now ordered, would anything new ever have been discovered? For ten thousand times ten thousand years these things were unknown to the people of those times; it is a thousand years, or twice as many, since they came to be: some were made known by Daedalus, some by Orpheus, some by Palamedes.” And in saying that these things came about, he indicates ten thousand times ten thousand years from the flood to Daedalus. And after saying much about the cities of the world, their settlements and nations, he admits that he has said these things by guesswork. For he says: “If, stranger, some god were to promise us that, if we undertook the examination of legislation, what has now been said …” Clearly he spoke by guesswork; and if by guesswork, then what he said is not true.