The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  The most famous of the three is Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, born in Rome in 480 to an ancient noble family. His ancestors included numerous consuls and senators, two emperors and a pope. Orphaned young, he was raised by another ancient noble family headed by Quintus Symmachus, consul in 485 and later prefect of Rome under Theodoric. By 510 the 30-year-old Boethius was accomplished enough as an intellectual and politician for Theodoric to tap him for consul and for several delicate diplomatic missions--including the delivery of a water clock and sundial, long symbols of learning and of Roman culture, to the king of the Burgundians. Soon after, Theodoric appointed him to the high office of magister officiorum, a kind of royal chief of staff in charge of the civil service and palace officials. In 522 Boethius was honoured again by the king’s appointment of his two sons to the consulship, approved by both Theodoric and the emperor in Constantinople, who retained a titular authority over such offices.

  But Boethius’s true love was learning. This was his summum vitae solamen, his chief solace in life. Somehow finding the time, he plunged into scholarly pursuits, translating into Latin, Gibbon tells us, ‘the geometry of Euclid . . . the mechanics of Archimedes, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the theology of Plato and the logic of Aristotle’. These translations are the only reason many of these works were preserved into the Middle Ages. Boethius also penned tracts on theology and a treatise on mathematics--a compendium of the knowledge of numbers that became a textbook for scholars in the Middle Ages, used by time reckoners among others, who were indebted to Boethius’s careful recitation of mathematical concepts such as whole numbers, geometric equations and proportions.

  But by far Boethius’s most important--and haunting--work was his thin Consolation of Philosophy, written while he was imprisoned in a fortress tower in Pavia by Theodoric and tortured daily during the winter of 524-525. Why the king arrested his brilliant magistcr officiorum is not clear, though historians surmise the king suspected Boethius of conspiring with the emperor in Constantinople, possibly over religious matters. Because Theodoric and the Goths were Arian, tensions inevitably ran high at times, particularly after the prelates of Constantinople and Rome settled a series of long-standing disputes shortly before Boethius was arrested. This rapprochement between the defunct western and still viable eastern wings of the old empire undoubtedly made Theodoric uneasy as the Byzantines stirred to life militarily under their new emperor, Justinian (483-565)--who in fact would invade Italy and crush the Ostrogoths a few years later.

  Whatever the reason, Boethius’s cruel imprisonment provides a tragic but poetic coda on the ancient world, including a farewell to the ancient view of time as something to be studied and contemplated instead of shunned or left to a few expert monks assigned the task of determining Easter. One can feel the anguish of this man, whose own imprisonment becomes a metaphor for the end of learning even as time slows down and the world, in his view, darkens:

  So sinks the mind in deep despair

  And sight grows dim; when the storms of life

  Blow surging up the weight of care,

  It banishes its inward light

  And turns in trust to the dark without.

  This was the man who once was free

  To climb the sky with zeal devout

  To contemplate the crimson sun,

  The frozen fairness of the moon

  Astronomer once used in joy

  To comprehend and to commune

  With planets on their wandering ways.

  This man, this man sought out the source

  Of storms that roar and rouse the seas;

  The spirit that rotates the world,

  The cause that translocates the sun

  From shining East to watery West;

  He sought the reason why spring hours

  Are mild with flowers manifest,

  And who enriched with swelling grapes

  Ripe autumn at the full of year.

  Now see that mind that searched and made

  All Nature’s hidden secrets clear

  Lie prostrate prisoner of the night.

  His neck bends low in shackles thrust,

  And he is forced beneath the weight

  To contemplate--the lowly dust.

  In the Consolation Boethius finds comfort in his intellect, in striving for truth through philosophy, and through God. Indeed, his spirit, which was so clearly at odds with the anti-intellcctualism then spreading over Europe, would also console those solitary monks and thinkers left tending the dim flicker of light that constituted learning through the long, dusky centuries to come.

  It fell to the second of the three men in this odd Gothic-Roman world to carry on Boethius’s ideals as darkness truly fell. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus was born about 490 to another of Rome’s influential patrician families. The son of a praetorian prefect of Rome under Theodoric, Cassiodorus became his father’s aide in his late teens or early twenties, while plunging into the same sort of intellectual pursuits as his friend Boethius. And like his friend, Cassiodorus was noticed at a young age by the German king, who moved him rapidly through the ranks of the imperial civil service. In 523 Theodoric appointed him to be Boethius’s replacement in the top job of magister officiorum in Ravenna even as his friend was being tortured in prison and penning his soulful Consolation. It seems that Cassiodorus either did nothing to help, or could do nothing. Official correspondence preserved from this period, written mostly by Cassiodorus, does not mention Boethius’s plight.

  Apparently Cassiodorus was less threatening to Theodoric than Boethius was. He not only survived the immediate peril of the king’s wrath, but also lived well beyond Theodoric’s reign. He died decades later, long after the Goths themselves were driven out of Italy by Justinian, the Byzantine emperor who tried--and failed--to revive the empire in the West. While the Goths reigned in Italy, Cassiodorus served as a high official for Theodoric and his successors, including a daughter named Amalasuntha, who ruled eight years as regent for her infant son. For 15 years he also stood behind many of the efforts to revive and repair the crumbling cities of the Roman heartland, penning edicts in the king’s name--including orders to restore and preserve monuments, an increasingly hopeless task after Theodoric’s death. ‘Do not let these images perish,’ he pleaded in one edict, referring to the deterioration of certain bronze elephants on the Via Sacra in Rome, ‘since it is Rome’s glory to collect in herself the artisan’s skills whatever bountiful nature has given birth to in all the world.’ He also published numerous works, including a history of the Goths and a twelve-volume set of his official correspondence as magister officiorum--highly literate epistles that discuss a number of scientific topics, including expositions on the months of the year.

  Soon after the capture of Ravenna by Justinian in 540--which briefly reconnected parts of the old western empire with the eastern part--Cassiodorus travelled to Constantinople, plunging into the intellectual life of the Byzantine capital. He stayed for a decade and a half at what was then a crossroad of old-world culture and learning and Christianity, returning home to Italy in 554. What he found there was chilling--a homeland shattered after the final convulsive wars between the Goths and Byzantines. Huge swaths of the countryside lay wasted. The city of Rome itself was virtually in ruins. In the end Justinian had won against the Goths, but the price had been the near destruction of Italy. Moreover, the Byzantines were stretched so thin that they soon would lose much of their bitterly won territory to the Lombards, yet another tribe of German barbari pressing against the northern frontier of Italy.

  This was a critical moment for Cassiodorus and many other Roman scholars and nobles now faced with the undeniable end of the old world. They could think of only one thing to do: withdraw from the broken walls and ravaged streets of Rome and other cities to their estates in the country, which over the years of turmoil Rome’s powerful families had fortified with stout walls and defences in what became early prototypes for medieval castles. But when Cassiodorus joined
the exodus to the countryside he took with him his thirst for knowledge, turning his family estate near the toe of Italy’s boot into a combination school and religious retreat--a scholar’s monastery, a place of learning that mixed rhetoric, mathematics, time reckoning and other elements of a classical curriculum with religious study. In this way Cassiodorus turned his back on the outside world he had served for so long, withdrawing intellectually and spiritually as well as physically to become a spiritualist and a conversus--one who ‘converts’ from a life of evil to one of living according to Christian principles.

  This approach was considerably different from the majority of monasteries and communities of monks then forming in Italy and across Europe, most of whom specifically avoided any knowledge not directly applicable to their faith, or they took a stance that all useful knowledge had already been written down, so there was no use searching for more. Cassiodorus embraced both ancient and Christian thought, insisting that the monastery should be a place to worship and to preserve a spirit of learning--which included a somewhat desperate attempt by Cassiodorus to save ancient manuscripts as city libraries and schools were ransacked and abandoned.

  Already in his sixties when he became a full-time monk, Cassiodorus devoted the remaining years of his long life to building up his monastery. He assembled a collection of ancient texts that some say numbered in the low thousands, and he wrote about a wide range of subjects--including a defence of old-world science that echoes Boethius’s devotion to philosophy. In doing so he helped preserve the rudiments of time reckoning during the dark centuries to come, leading up to Roger Bacon’s strident restatement eight centuries later of Cassiodorus’s belief in the truth of science as an expression of God’s creation. Around 550 Cassiodorus wrote a defence of mathematics and how it is critical to astronomy and time reckoning:

  It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of this discipline [mathematics]. If we learn the hours by it, if we calculate the courses of the moon, if we take note of the time lapsed in the recurring year, we will be taught by numbers and preserved from confusion. Remove the computus from the world, and everything is given over to blind ignorance. It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.

  Cassiodorus was hardly a secularist, however. In extensive writings about arithmetic, astronomy and the science of time reckoning--which he called computus--he makes a critical distinction between time measurement and time reckoning. The first, he said, is merely a matter of making observations of celestial bodies and jotting down numbers, and using mechanical devices such as clocks that require technical skill but not intellectual achievement to manufacture. Time reckoning, on the other hand, is purely intellectual, says Cassiodorus. It recognizes God’s miracles of numbers and their usefulness in making calculations of time, which are critical to a believer for planning when and how he will worship God, with the ultimate calculation being the true date of Easter.

  This did not mean that Cassiodorus disapproved of astronomy or of clocks. Years earlier a more secular Cassiodorus had written to tell his friend Boethius that the horologium--a combination sundial and water clock--was the highest achievement of civilization, held in awe by barbarians. He still believed this late in life when he told his monks:

  We do not want to leave you in ignorance of hour-measurements; they were, as you know, invented for the great benefit of humanity. For this reason I had two clocks made for you, a sundial fed by sunlight, and a water clock giving the number of hours constantly, by day and night.

  But Cassiodorus did not teach his pupils how to construct these mechanisms, believing that monks should contemplate theory and calculations and not spend their time like village mechanics tinkering with devices. In this spirit the elderly Cassiodorus and his followers used their science of computus to create daily, weekly and monthly calendars of sacred days and monastic duties and feasts. They also wrote the first textbook explaining how to compute Easter, beginning with the year 562--a set of instructions widely used in the Middle Ages, though not exactly as Cassiodorus intended. Indeed, for a man setting out to preserve knowledge and to inspire intellectual thought, his textbook allowed generations of monks simply to follow a basic formula for determining dates, rather than learn the processes behind the calculations. Likewise, Cassiodorus’s water clocks quickly fell into disrepair after the master died, since no one knew how to maintain them.

  But it was a sign of these tumultuous times, when monks seemed to be setting up monasteries on every rocky hill in Italy, that what one monastic teacher was condemning, another was condoning. So even as Cassiodorus’s clocks stopped in southern Italy another leading monastic figure not connected to our three young men in Rome, Abbot Benedict of Nursia in Umbria, was energetically teaching his monks to make clocks and to use them to tell time down to the hour--something no one had done before in such a systematic or official way.

  Benedict was a typical monastic in his belief that devotees should concentrate on the hereafter, and that man’s time on earth was ephemeral. But he also shared the ascetics’ obsession with following rules to reinforce his faith, which led him to embrace clocks as instruments that could serve man in his service to God. In about 540, the year Ravenna fell to Justinian and Cassiodorus moved to Constantinople, Benedict wrote a guide to what he considered proper worship, known as The Benedictine Rule. This included a table of hours setting out a strict list of duties, prayers, mealtimes and ceremonies linked to a careful measuring of each hour of the day.

  Before the Rules a monastery’s abbot typically arranged tasks and schedules for his tightly-knit community. But Benedict, working in the spirit of creating uniform rules for the universal (Catholic) church, refused to leave this to the whim of individual abbots. Wanting to be sure that a monk in Naples was saying the same Psalm at the same hour as one in Provence, he ordered that time be kept accurately and objectively by using the best clocks then available: the sundial and water clock, and later a ‘candle clock’ made to burn in measured hourly increments.

  Benedict’s Rule started with the Christian calendar as it then existed, with its saints’ days, holy days associated with Christ’s life, celebrations and feasts. He then assigned tasks and duties to virtually every day of the year, using as his inspiration the Roman army’s system of loosely dividing the day into hours, with daily watches rotating on the third, sixth and ninth hours (morning, noon and afternoon). Benedict ordered these three key points announced each day in the monastery. He also delineated canonical hours that did not have to be announced: dawn (matutina), sunrise (prima hora), sunset (vespera) and the coming of complete darkness at night (completorium). He listed certain Psalms to be read each day and at the beginning of the seven named hours so that everyone would know the correct hour and when it began. He fixed precise hours for waking, eating, working and resting, and staggered them according to the seasons. For instance:

  During the winter, that is from 1 November (a Kalendis Novembribus) till Easter, the time of rising will be the eighth hour of the night, according to the usual reckoning. From Easter till 1 October (Kalendas Octubres) the brethren should set out in the morning and work at whatever is necessary from the first hour till about the fourth. From the fourth hour until the Sext they should be engaged in reading. After the sixth hour, and when they have had their meal, they may rest on their beds in complete silence. . . . The Nones prayers should be said rather early, at about the middle of the eighth hour, and then they should work again at their tasks until Vespers.

  Benedict’s system meant that Christian monks for centuries would live under Rome’s civil calendar and the Roman army’s day, imposed far more strictly than by the old empire’s magistrates and generals. But the idea here was not temporal power or political order but a test of willpower and belief, and a means by which monks could fill their days with manual work that would keep their minds sharply focused on spiritual matters. ‘Idleness is an enemy of the soul,’ wrote Benedict.


  The abbot of Nursia’s rules eventually spread to monasteries across Europe, becoming a symbol of faith for devotees in a medieval era that otherwise ignored time. As something that set apart monks from the rest of society, the Benedictine system also engendered in laymen a sense that following a strict schedule of duties according to the clock was an important part of religious devotion. Eventually, the Benedictine’s sense of time crept into everyday life and language. The word siesta, for instance, comes from the abbot setting aside an hour of rest after the midday meal at the sixth hour. Devout Catholics still pray at matins in the early morning and at vespers in the evening. Some historians believe that modern capitalism, with its use of time as an economic unit--for wages, contracts and interest rates--grew in part out of the Benedictine fixation on measuring time.

  When Cassiodorus was still a young man he met, and perhaps was taught by the third of our troika in Rome, an abbot named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 500-560)--’Little Dennis’. Described as a Scythian--one of a barbarian people who a century earlier had been driven south by the Huns from their ancient home in the Caucasus--little is known about Dionysius other than his work on the calendar and on one of the first collections of official Catholic rules known as canons. He knew Boethius and Cassiodorus, but was probably older. Late in life Cassiodorus remembered him fondly as a brilliant scholar with a great fluency in translating Greek and Latin. Also an accomplished mathematician and astronomer, in 525--the year Boethius was executed--Pope John I (d. 526) asked him to calculate the Easter date for the next year. At the time this was part of an effort by the Roman church to wean itself from its sister church in the East, who long had treated the science of determining Easter like some arcane pharaonic secret, a mystery understood only by those steeped in the tradition of Aristarchus and Claudius Ptolemy. With a wave of his Latin quill Dionysius changed all of this, ending the long hegemony of Alexandria by co-opting their formulas and methods, freeing Rome at last from the time lords of this ancient city of stargazers.