Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/74

G4 Journal of Philology. used to give effect to the science of the East, is one of the noblest and best results of the Roman empire. The effect of the reformed annual measurement was different in different parts of the world. In Egypt the months, retaining their old names and natures, only became fixed by the quad- riennial intercalation of a day at the end of the year 33 , (as far, that is, as the Julian year was fixed). In Greece a great con- fusion arose between the Julian reckoning and the old ; and the Attic lunar months, for instance, gradually went out of use, after having passed through a period in which their names were used very irregularly, sometimes out of their order 34 , and sometimes to represent months similar to the Roman, or our present ones. But in the countries which were but imperfectly civilized at the time of the Roman conquest, such for instance as Spain, there is reason to believe that the introduction of the Julian year was the first beginning of an effective reckoning of time at all : and that it became an epoch, from which the series of years thus measured was counted. Such is Voss's 35 view of the origin of the famous Spanish reckoning of time in which the years were called * era 1/ * era 2/ ' era 50/ &c. 36 , and from which our word 'era,' now, to the confusion of thought, used so generally, has been derived. If it is really a Hispano-Roman reckoning, this is a more probable account of its origin than the supposition of its being, like the reckonings in the East, a dynastial reckoning from the establishment of the Roman empire: for there seems no reason why there alone in the West such a reckoning should arise 37 . In the opinion of some, however, it is not a Roman 33 As to how early, or how effec- is probably from a different date of the tually this was done, see Clinton, F. H. Nativity. Vol. ii. p. 328. 87 Unless we can suppose the pre- 84 The relative precedency of Mae- vious Orientalization of Spain by way of macterion and Pyanepsion seems even Africa, to have had any thing to do yet hardly to be fixed. See Clinton, with it. Ideler, who collects (Handb. ubi sup. der Chron. II. p. 426), the various deri- 35 Etymol. L. L. ad v. (referred to vations of the word which have been by Ideler, ubi inf.) proposed, seems to have a strong hanker- 38 It is hardly correct in Niebuhr ing after the Arabic one, only that the (H. R. I. p. 258) to describe this as "the use of the word long before the Arabian Spanish era from the battle of Actium." occupation of Spain excludes it. If the Its epoch was in B.C. 38, seven years derivation is really in itself probably it before it. There is a quotation in Du- is to be remembered, that the Carthagi- cange marking it as 28 B.C., but this nian conquest of Spain was a previous