Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: PEACE ON EARTH was (Re: Christmas...) Message-ID: Date: 20 Jan 91 19:46:31 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 58 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Dennis Kriz wrote: > >...And arguably none of them (except by chance) celebrated > >the holiday on Dec. 25th, because the solstice falls on Dec 21st. and Merlyn LeRoy observes: > It's hard to tell when the days stop getting shorter and start getting > longer when your only instruments are a few sticks stuck in the ground. > It would take 3 or 4 days before they could be certain that the days > were getting longer, thus the celebration misses the event by a few days. Actually, both comments are arguably wide of the mark. Ancient astronomy was by Roman times quite competent (in both Greek and Babylonian versions) to find the date of the solstice to within several hours. The Julian year with its approximation of 365.25 days per year is itself an argument that the date was knowable to within 6 hours. The arrangement that Caesar put into effect was intended to have the equinoxes and solstices on the 25th of the relevant months (traditional Roman calendar dates for these, though the Republican calendar Caesar was replacing was actually handled more or less like the US budget process (there were good reasons for that -- the manipulation of the calendar could enable the manipulator to prevent his political opponents from transacting business, because a day was _nefas_.)) Julius up and got knifed shortly after his reform, and Civil War and the traditional Roman inability to comprehend calendars left things a political mess until Augustus eventually got around to cleaning it up, and towards the end of his reign the standard Julian rule (extra day in Febrauray every 4 years; actually the Romans inserted this as what we would call a "second February 23rd" -- in their reckoning, a 2nd day counted as the 6th before the calends of March. Roman arithmetic and time reckoning is enough to drive any sane person utterly mad) began to be applied reliably. Partly because of political/calendrical chaos, the solstice then really "was" at nearer the 21st (and more important, the spring equinox which sets the date of Passover and Easter was around March 21st.) Astronomers (all Greeks, of course :-)) knew this, but the Romans still "thought" of the date as the 25th. Of course WE know that the Julian rule is about 3 days off every 400 years, a matter not corrected until 1582 (or later in lands suspicious of the Pope) when the equinox was actually occuring around the 10th or 11th of March. They "dropped" 10 days to restore the equinox to the 21st -- essentially, where it was when the Council of Nicea established the rule for calculating Easter. 1600 years earlier (about the time Augustus began to be aware that his calendar was a bit screwy), the equinoctial date would have been about March 23rd -- and if we project the Julian calendar back to the days of the Punic Wars (which is where Roman tradition really saw itself, forever after -- just as Americans tend to "see" themselves in the days of the Revolution) it really DOES come out at the 25th. Of course, it is a good bet that, all tradition to the contrary notwithstanding, there was NEVER a Roman equinox actually transpiring on a date that the contemporary Romans (if they would ever count sensibly) would have *called* March 25th. Now, aren't you glad you asked? :-) -- Michael L. Siemon We must know the truth, and we must m.siemon@ATT.COM love the truth we know, and we must ...!att!attunix!mls act according to the measure of our love. standard disclaimer -- Thomas Merton