Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/80

 70 Journal of Philology. months distant from a point of time which is distant from us 1853 complete years and a few weeks; we call that point the epoch of the birth of Christ because Dionysius considered it to be such, and it must have a name of some sort : and the actual birth of Christ, whenever it did occur, say four years before, is at least so near that no practical error of thought can arise from the name. It is very unlikely that in any case epochs, unless they are dynastial epochs adopted contemporaneously for current dating, should represent the proper time of an event as they profess to do. A historical epoch is assumed for the purpose of building upon it a system of chronology, and then this sys- tem is almost sure to fix the time of the event which suggested the epoch, more accurately than it was known when the epoch was assumed : epochs, historically, are only a convenient assump- tion, representing in common language a great event, and in accurate language a fixed point of time somewhere near it, from which years are counted. The associating by Dionysius of the epoch of the Incarnation with his Paschal cycle was likely to make it generally known, because that cycle came into general use : but the first person who made it a historical epoch was a countryman of our own, Bede. In the Northern parts of the old Roman empire there was no regular reckoning such as the era above mentioned furnished to Spain and the South of France. Bede for his history had to adopt one : he might have introduced the era, which must have been known to him and of which he perhaps saw the con- venience in Isidore, into the North, or he might have adopted some Christian reckoning, such as were in use at Constantin- ople in his time and the century before, from the Resurrection or Ascension. But he was a calendarian philosopher as well as a historian, and well acquainted therefore with the Dionysian reckoning, and this was the epoch he chose to adopt. After him it became by degrees widely spread both for current and historic dating, last of all however, as has been said, at Rome : the era gave place to it, and then the complicated calendarian dating of the middle ages, till finally the present simple plan became universal. On the adoption however of this way of dating there came