Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/78

 68 Journal of Philology. great variety of reckonings were in use : we have now to see what sort of reckoning established itself, as a new society, formed from barbarianism, took the place of the old. The calendarian or cyclical investigations which have been spoken of, were what then brought the course of years before people most prominently. At the council of Nice, the charge of taking care of the Easter cycles had been committed to the bishops of Alexandria, as the special abode of astronomy and science: but the jealousies at this time rife between the East and the West, caused a continual disputing about them. In many of the years in the 5th century A. D., Easter was celebrated on a different day at Rome and at Alexandria. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, constructed a cycle or calendar of 95 years (5 x 19) for the determination of Easter, and made this cycle to begin in what he called the 152d year of Diocletian, ac- cording to the then Alexandrian reckoning : at Rome however, his calendar was not admitted. But in the year 525 A. D., when Cyril's cycle was nearly run out, Dionysius Exiguus, a Roman abbot, made an effort to reconcile, as to the Calendar, the East and West, and to procure the admission of Cyril's cycle, with some modifications, during its second repetition, at Rome. In republishing the Cycle for this purpose, he altered the way of marking the years of it from the years of Diocletian, which was an Egyptian reckoning not usual or understood at Rome, and one moreover, as he himself mentions, likely to be most un- grateful for a Christian calendar on account of the odious memory of that persecutor : and the way of reckoning which he adopted instead of it, was from the epoch, as he fixed it, of the Incarnation or Birth of our Blessed Lord. The reasons why he chose the Incarnation, rather than the Death or Resurrection of our Lord to count from (considering that the origin of Christi- anity was at that time associated rather with these last), were, there can be but little doubt, cyclical, as well as the occasion on which he thus first used the epoch; but the discussion of them, though most interesting, is too long for this place. He designated then the year in which the Cyrillian cycle was to begin its second repetition as the year 532 after the Incarnation its old empire in this reckoning, which Gibbon, Dec. an <* *'all, c. i ", near the is still in use in the Papal Court. (See end)