Time in History: Views of Time From Prehistory to the Present Day
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and transferred to August. To avoid having three months each of 31 days occurring in succession, September and November were each reduced to 30 days and October and December were each raised to 31. Thus to honour the first of the Roman emperors an orderly arrangement was reduced to an illogical jumble that many people find difficult to remember but which in the course of 2,000 years has been successfully imposed on most of the world.
Although originally the Roman calendar began in the spring on 1 March (as reflected in our names for the months September to December), the consuls, who were elected for one year, in 153 BC began to take office on 1 January. From then on the year was regarded by the Romans as beginning on that day. Later this choice was considered to be pagan by the Church because of the festivities traditionally associated with it. Instead the Church preferred to use the Annunciation for the first day of the year, and this led to the adoption of 25 March, nine months before Christmas, although this choice was by no means universal. (Astronomers, as a rule, kept to 1 January as the beginning of the year. Generally, the history of the beginning of the civil year is complicated.57 For example, in Venice the year began on 1 March until the fall of the republic in 1797.) From AD 312 'indiction cycles' of fifteen years' duration were introduced by the Emperor Constantine for taxation purposes and led to the Byzantine year being reckoned from 1 September, the date on which each year of an indiction cycle began. They remained popular in the West throughout the Middle Ages and even continued to be used by the supreme tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire until its abolition by Napoleon in 1806.
The Romans made use of the idea of denominating the years by a single era count. This idea had been put into practice in 312/311 BC by Seleucus I, the Hellenistic ruler of Babylonia. The following century the Greek system of dating by successive Olympiads from the first in 776 BC was begun, either by the historian Timaeus of Sicily or by Eratosthenes, the famous librarian of the Museum in Alexandria and measurer of the earth, and later Greek chronology was based upon it. The Roman system of dating ab urbe condita (i.e. from the foundation of Rome) was introduced by Varro in the first century BC and was based on the date assigned to the fabled founding of the city. Although this system was ratified by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and was widely used, there was some uncertainty about the precise relation of the resulting Roman dates to those of the Olympiads.58 According to the historian Polybius, the founding of Rome occurred at an Olympiad dating corresponding to 750 BC.
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Other dates were also ascribed to this event. In the time of Augustus the list that was compiled of magistrates of the Republic was based on counting from 752 BC. The date that was eventually generally accepted was 753 BC, originally suggested by Varro ( 116-27 BC). According to tradition, the birthday of Rome was on the festival of Parilia, 21 April. Consequently, on that day in the year AD 247 the Romans celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the founding of their city. Coins were minted bearing the famous inscription Roma aeterna--' Rome, the eternal city'.
Among the conventions for the division of time that have come down to us from Imperial Rome is the seven-day week. Its origin can be traced back to the Sumerians and Babylonians. It was never used by the Greeks, who divided the month into three parts of ten days each, but it was employed by the Jews (see p. 55). Originally, the Romans had a complicated system of dividing the month, with Calends (from which our word 'calendar' is derived) on the first, Ides on the fifteenth of March, May, July, and October and on the thirteenth day of the other months, and Nones occurring eight days before the Ides. Originally, the Calends were the days of new moon and the Ides the days of full moon. Initially, the year was divided into the ten months March to December, the period midwinter to spring being left out because there was little agricultural work to be done then. Later this period was divided into the months January and February. In the early history of Rome the only times recognized in the daylight period were sunrise, midday, and sunset. The nights, however, were divided into four vigilae (or watches), this system being presumably of military origin. The days were counted backwards, from the Calends, Nones, and Ides, respectively. The day from which the Romans calculated and the day to be designated were both included, for example, 2 January was designated ante diem IV Non. Jan. The Nones were so named because they occurred on the 'ninth' day before the Ides. The days after the Ides were reckoned as days before the Calends of the succeeding month. This system was still in use in western Europe as late as the sixteenth century!59
In Imperial times, however, the custom became popular, under astrological influence, to use the seven-day week with the different days named after the respective 'planets'.60 Inscriptions at Pompeii list the 'days of the gods', namely Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. This order, from which our modern days of the week derive (e.g. in French), appears at first sight to be devoid of sense, since it does not accord in an obvious way with the order in which (according to pre-Copernican cosmology) the 'planets' were thought to
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lie in relation to the earth: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon. The explanation is that the planets were believed to rule the hours of the day as well as the days of the week and that each day was associated with the planet that rules its first hour. The first hour of Saturday was ruled by Saturn, and similarly the eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-second hours. The twenty-third was allotted to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the first of the next day to the sun, which thus ruled Sunday, and so on through the week. From this comes the custom, introduced in the third century AD, of indicating the most important dates according to the weekdays as well.61
The Christians, because of the Jewish origin of their religion, at first adhered to the Jewish seven-day week in which the days, except the Sabbath, were numbered but not named. In due course, however, they began to be influenced by the astrological beliefs of converts from paganism; as a result, they adopted the planetary week. Meanwhile, the influence of Mithraism had led the pagans to substitute Dies Solis (the Sun-day) for the Dies Saturnis (the Saturn-day) as the first day of the week. This change appealed to the Christians who had long observed Sunday--the Lord's Day (Dies Dominica) on which Christ rose from the dead--as the first day of the week, in place of the Jewish Sabbath. The planetary week was officially adopted in AD 321 by the Emperor Constantine, who also followed the Christian practice of regarding Sunday, instead of Saturday, as the first day of the week. He formally decreed that magistrates, citizens, and artisans were to rest from their labours 'on the venerable day of the sun', but he permitted field work. Already in the first century AD, under the influence of Judaism, Roman Society had begun to introduce a weekly day of rest--unlike ancient Greece where there were not even any school holidays, except on special occasions such as days in honour of Apollo, Poseidon, etc.62 Tertullian (c. 155-222) was the first Church Father to declare that Christians ought to abstain on Sunday from secular duties or occupations, lest these should give pleasure to the Devil.
The first mention of Christmas Day, as far as we know, was in the Roman calendar for the year 354. Previously, 6 January had been celebrated as the Epiphany, or anniversary of Christ's baptism, which was believed to have occurred on his thirtieth birthday. The choice of 6 January for this purpose has been traced back to the gnostic Christians of Egypt, the corresponding date in the calendar used there being traditionally associated with the blessing of the Nile. Christ's birthday only became important for the Church when infant baptism replaced
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adult baptism. This led to the belief that Christ's divine nature originated at his birth rather than at his baptism. As a result, by about the year 400 Christmas Day had become a significant date in the Christian Year: 25 December was chosen so as to exorcize the great pagan festival of the solar solstice.
In the latter part of the fourth century the last great emperor of the west, Theodosius, who was of Spanish origin, finally abolished the pagan Roman calendar
with its hotchpotch of festivals, thereby severing one of the most familiar links the Romans had with their historic past. Consequently, it is to him that the European world owes a uniform calendar corresponding to the needs of a universal society and based upon the Christian year. In 386 he reaffirmed his decree and invoked severe sanctions against those who desecrated the Lord's Day.63 The view that the Lord's Day is essentially the Jewish Sabbath--a 'taboo' day--transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week found expression from time to time in medieval law and theology. It culminated in the sabbatarian excesses of English and Scottish Puritanism and the Sunday legislation, much of which has been relaxed since the First World War.
Easter was introduced in Rome about the year 160, and as in Alexandria was celebrated on the Sunday following the Hebrew Passover, which for practical purposes could be reckoned as the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. A set of Easter tables drawn up by Cyril of Alexandria ( 376-444) was accompanied by a consecutive set of years beginning with the Emperor Diocletian and his persecution in AD 284, but when in AD 525 a Scythian monk living in Rome, Dionysius Exiguus, prepared a continuation of Cyril's tables, at the request of Pope John I, he felt that it was inappropriate to reckon from the reign of this enemy of Christianity, and he chose instead to date the years from Christ's Incarnation.64 Astronomical evidence suggests that this may have occurred in the first half of the year 5 BC. (For astronomers, unlike historians and chronologists, there is a year 0.) Although Dionysius' system was the origin of the AD sequence that we now employ, it was not made use of for nearly 200 years, the oldest known work in which it is employed being Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, of the early eighth century. The BC system, extending backwards from the birth of Christ, was occasionally used by Bede, but after him it lapsed until the fifteenth century. It did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century.
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5. Time in the Middle Ages
Medieval Europe
In the year 430 the Vandals, who had crossed the Mediterranean not long before, were battering at the walls of St Augustine's home town as he lay there dying. This can be regarded as symbolic. For, in its great days, particularly in the age of the Antonines in the second century, the Roman empire had been primarily a civilization of towns. These were very different from the haphazard constructions of medieval Europe. They were deliberately planned with their streets laid out in orthogonal grid-systems like the great cities of Hellenistic times, such as Alexandria and Antioch. The decay of the Roman empire was most clearly revealed by the decline of towns and increasing ruralization. This transformation occurred primarily in the northern and western provinces, which were always more of a liability and less a source of wealth and culture than the southern and eastern provinces. For example, Africa supplied Rome with two-thirds of its corn, transported in the great grain ships which must have been among the most impressive sights of antiquity. The northern and western provinces were comparatively much less developed and the principal towns in them, such as Segovia, Arles, York, and Cologne, were primarily military camps.
Among the causes of the fall of the Roman empire were successive attacks by barbarians. Although in the sixth century the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's great generals Belisarius and Narses succeeded in reconquering much of the west, so that for a time the Mediterranean again became a Roman lake, in the following century Europe faced a dangerous new enemy. Fanatical warriors inspired by a new and militaristic religion, Islam, brought about the final break between East and West. By the year 700 learning in western Europe was confined to Ireland and the coast of Northumbria. The only centres of learning were the monasteries in those remote areas, and it is in one of these, founded in 682 at Jarrow by a wealthy Northumbrian nobleman turned monk, Benedict Biscop, that we find 'the first scientific intellect produced by the Germanic peoples of Europe'.1 The Venerable Bede ( 673-735) spent
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most of his life at Jarrow as a Benedictine monk, praying, reading, and teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was ordained priest by St John of Beverley, so gaining the title 'Venerable', which was a rare dignity among monks, but the usual form of address for a priest at that time. A really great scholar, he had a unique opportunity to develop his abilities, because Biscop had brought back to Jarrow some 200 to 300 antique books that he had managed to acquire in southern Italy. Bede also had access to the library collected by Bishop Acca at Hexham.2 He was thus able to acquire an unusually extensive knowledge for his day of ancient literature, including the works of St Augustine and the scientific writings of the elder Pliny.
Bede's main object in life was to transmit his knowledge in intelligible form to his contemporaries and successors, and in this he was eminently successful. As Sir Arthur Bryant has so vividly put it, 'That life of scholarship and labour, with the tireless hand writing amid the intervals of prayer and teaching, sometimes so frozen that it could hardly grip the pen, is one of the proud memories of England.'3 In all Bede wrote thirty- five works, of which twenty were commentaries on Exodus, Proverbs, and other books of the Bible and six were works of chronology. His most famous book The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation was the first historical work produced in England. Written in Latin, it was translated into English towards the end of the ninth century by Alfred the Great. Containing a greater proportion of secular matter than the Church history of Eusebius, it was based partly on written material and partly on the memories of men still living. A considerable part of medieval historiography was based upon it. In particular, Bede had a direct influence on the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century through his pupil Egbert, who became Archbishop of York and trained Alcuin, who under Charlemagne founded the Frankish schools that did so much to stimulate learning on the Continent.
Bede's writings are of considerable importance in the history of chronology. This had already become a subject of crucial significance in England during the course of the seventh century. Although the death in battle of Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, in 655 sealed the victory of Christianity over heathenism, this important event was overshadowed by dissension between the Roman and Celtic Churches. The principal source of discord concerned the date of Easter. Our present rules for its determination (see Appendix 3), as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, follow the Roman tradition whereby Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first full moon following (or on) 21 March. But if full moon occurs
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on a Sunday then Easter Day is the following Sunday. The reason for this was to avoid concurrence with the Jewish Passover. (The expression 'full moon' means the fourteenth day of the moon reckoned from its first appearance.) The Celtic Church, founded in the sixth century by St Columba with the aid of Irish-trained monks, followed Rome in always celebrating Easter on a Sunday, unlike the eastern Churches; but owing to its remoteness the Celtic Church experienced difficulty in being kept fully informed of doctrinal and other changes decided on in Rome. Consequently, unlike Canterbury, it failed to keep in line with the Roman practice when the fourteenth day of the moon fell on a Sunday. As a result, by the middle of the seventh century a peculiar difficulty had arisen in Northumbria. For, although King Oswy followed the Celtic practice, his consort, Queen Eanfleda, who had with her a Kentish priest named Romanus, adhered to the Roman practice. Most years this gave rise to no special problem, but eventually there was an occasion when the king's enjoyment of the Easter Feast was spoilt by the absence of his queen, who was still fasting because for her it was Palm Sunday.
To resolve the problem of Easter and other points of dispute between the Churches, Oswy convened the Synod of Whitby in 664. In chapter 24 of his Ecclesiastical History Bede gives an account of what took place. Oswy was probably unable to follow in detail the abstruse arguments put forward, but in the end he decided to accept the Roman practice, on the grounds that at the gates of heaven the keys are held by St Peter, and against him he would not contend. 'The king h
aving said this, all present, both great and small, gave their assent, and renouncing the more imperfect institution resolved to conform to that which they found to be better.'4 Henceforth, the English Churches were to have the advantages of the unity and discipline that the Church of Rome had inherited from the Empire.
Bede not only compiled a detailed account of this important Synod but in another of his treatises, De temporum ratione ('On the Reckoning of Time'), written in 725 and generally regarded as his scientific master- piece, he computed Easter tables for the period 532 to 1063 and also made a first attempt at a general chronology of the world down to the reign of the contemporary Byzantine emperor, Leo the Isaurian. Chapter 29 of that work is remarkable for containing the first scientific investigation of the tides, involving the earliest 'establishment of a port', that is, the mean interval between the time of high water and that of the previous transit of the meridian by the moon.