Page:Chronologies and calendars (IA chronologiescale00macdrich).pdf/29

 may be remarked, initiated all his well-known 'Lays of Ancient Rome' by mentioning the respective year of the city, seeing that these portrayed the older city customs. Again, I found a quotation from a deed which bore the seemingly scanty date that Gallus was emperor, but from the regnal lists the date can be fixed as in spring, 252 A.D. Further, the Latinist Eutropius, writing at the end of the fourth century A.D., opens his second book of history as the 393rd year of Rome. We, however, come to one important and positive fact bearing upon the present era, namely, the general council held at Nice, in Asia Minor, in what we call the 325th year after the Advent. This gave rise to the Quarto-Decimans who contended that Easter should be celebrated on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month, near the vernal equinox, holding it as synchronous to the Jewish Passover.

22 But this council was not claimed at the time as being held in a certain year Anno Domini. Even Saint Jerome, writing his Evangelistas, calls a first century date as falling in the 'twenty-fifth year after the Passion,' while in the time of the Nicene Council it was becoming the ecclesiastical custom to refer to any year as 'in Indictione Romæ.' The Indiction was a chronological period of much consequence, and even in Scots' Burgh Records of the sixteenth century I have discovered traces of this reckoning. Fifteen years are allotted to an Indiction, and the Premier Indiction, which was introduced by Constantine the Great in connection with tribute-money payments, covered the period from 312 A.D. to 327 A.D. The popes and cardinals of Rome