Question about uncertain dates. Euripides’ play Electra was likely performed at one of the festivals of Dionysus in Athens in March in the years 419 to 416 BC. I can enter the Electra (a bit counter-intuitively) as a duration from 419 to 416, and try to use the earliest and latest start and finishing dates to indicate that the precise year is uncertain. But whilst the earliest “finishing date” of the Electra is March 419, and the latest “starting date” is March 416, there seems to be no way to represent this accurately on the timeline: Aeon refuses to accept a latest starting date that follows the earliest finishing date for the same event. I could pick a date in the middle of the period, say September 418, and declare it arbitrarily to be the latest beginning and earliest end, but of course that’s not actually the situation. Is there a better way of dealing with this?
I don’t work with the Timeline tab much, so others more adept with it could offer a definitive answer.
But a sort of brute force approach would be to replicate Electra into multiple events, setting each to a possible duration. (I haven’t worked out the optimal instances and durations, but it shouldn’t be too hard.)
The downside, of course, is you’d have multiple representations of the same event, but at least it would show you the possibilities on a single timeline.
I think, it depends on what exactly you want to visualize. “Event” is primarily a technical term. I would have no problem whatsoever with using an event to represent the “period during which Electra may have been performed the first time.”
This seems the right approach to me, as well.
How about creating one main event for the Euripides’ play Electra.
Then add 4 sub-events or “Child Events”,
- early start
- late start
- early end
- late end
Give them corresponding colors so that it is easy to see…
IF you know the duration of the play, you could add that as a duration for each of the Child Events, with the controlling dates as locked dates…
And actually, if you know the duration of the play, you can actually just add two Child Events, one for the start dates and one for the end dates. and add the related earliest and latest dates while the duriation wil remain the same for both the start and stop events.
So if the play had a duration of 1 day or 1 week, you would get this reflected in each of the Child Events…
If this is research and you find new clues, you can just add new Child/Sub Events for each new clue you find, and color code them as you go, e.g. Red for already known “end” dates, Orange for already known Start Dates, Green for your findings etc.