232
NOTES AND QUERIES.
[9 th S. I. MAR. 19, '98.
Easter proceeds from ME. ANSCOMBE'S assump-
tion that the use of the Dionysian Easter
tables implies, and is identical with, the use
of the Dionysian era for the dating of legal
and historical documents. This assumption
might have been saved by noting the
careful way in which the great writers on
chronology refrain from drawing such an
apparently obvious conclusion. That it is
fallacious may be proved by a single instance.
ME. ANSCOMBE assumes that because the
Roman Church used the Dionysian Easter
tables in the time of St. Gregory,* therefore
that Pope must have used the Dionysian era
for dating purposes. Now as a matter of fact
we know that the Papal chancery did not
begin to use this era until the tenth century,
and that Gregory himself dated his letters,
&c., by the imperial and consular years and
by indictions.t Moreover, the sixth-century
Christian monuments at Rome are dated in
the same manner. J They yield no instance
of the use of the Dionysian era. Here it is
necessary to refer to another fallacy of ME.
ANSCOMBE'S that the dating by indictions
implies amongst Christians the use of the era
of the Incarnation, since the "masters of
computistic " take a year of the Incarnation
as the basis of a calculation to find the indic-
tion of that year. He has omitted to point
out that they also give a rule to find the year
of the Incarnation by means of the indiction.
Dionysius himself dates the first year of his
cycle in the Roman legal manner that is, by
the indiction and by the consular year|| and
Beda in his earlier works similarly used the
Roman system.lT
- This, by the way, is only an assumption from
the later use of the English Church, as is pointed out by Krusch (Neues Archiv, ix. 114). This learned scholar, more careful than MR. ANSCOMBE, holds that by Gregory's time the Dionysian com- putation of Easter had become the predominant one at Rome.
f Paul Ewald, ' Studien zur Ausgabe des Registers Gregors I.' in the Neues Archiv, iii. 549. Similarly, a gift of his in 587 is thus dated (Marini, ' I Papiri Diplomatic!,' No. 89).
J De Rossi, ' Inscriptiones Urbis Romae Chris- tianas, ' i. iv. Especially noteworthy is the inscrip- tion of 565 (i. 501) of " Gerontms, primicerius notariorum sanctae e[c]clesiae Romanae," dated by indiction and consular year. It was to a pre- decessor of this chancery officer that Dionysius addressed one of his Paschal letters. The era of the Incarnation does not occur in the sixth and seventh century Italian deeds in Marini.
These " masters " merely repeat one of the Egyptian " argumenta " or calculi given by Dionysius.
|| Janus, ' Historia Cycli Dionysiani ' ( Vitem- bergae, 1715), p. 74.
If His 'De Temporibus,' written in 703, is dated by the imperial year and indiction (cc. 14, 22).
The following are the only examples
hitherto cited of the apparent use of the era
of the Incarnation prior to the time of Beda.
First we have two sixth-century instances
given by Jan,* the learned historian of this
era, wnich Ideler t rightly describes as
"ambiguous." They consist (a) of a cal-
culation of the age of the world in the
chronicle of Victor Tunensis from the Crea-
tion to the Nativity of Christ, and from then
to 567, and (b) of a note in the life of
St. Euthymius by Cyrillus that the saint died
5965 years after the Creation and 469 years
after the Nativity. Neither of these passages
proves the use of this reckoning as an era,!
for Victor calculates his dates by the consular
or imperial years, and Cyrillus records his
hero's birth and death in like manner. We
have next a quotation (c) from Bishop Julian
of Toledo, written in 686, giving the period
from the Creation and the Nativity. Here
again, as Prof. Riihl remarks, neither reckon-
ing is used as an era, since Julian carefully
explains the latter date by the Spanish era.
The same remark applies to (d) a Madrid
MS.|| giving the years from the Incarnation
to the year 672. All these four instances are
based, directly or indirectly, upon the cal-
culation of the age of the world by Eusebius
and Jerome, and they all distinctly use other
eras for dating purposes. Next comes (e) the
562 computus wrongly cited by ME. ANS-
COMBE as a work of Cassiodorus. This is not
a " computus Paschalis," as stated by Ideler
and Riihl, but is merely a portion of the
argumenta of Dionysiusl brought up to date,
Cf. Mommsen, 'Chronica Minora,' p. 226. This dating occurs even in his ' Chronica ' in reference to English events (ed. Mommsen, p. 311), although he occasionally uses the era of the Incarnation. This work was written in 725.
- ' Historia yErae Christianas,' Vitembergae, 1714,
p. 24.
f ' Handbuch der Chronologic,' ii. 375.
+ This has been already remarked by Jan regarding Victor. Jan also notes that it is not clear whether Cyrillus here uses the era of Dionysius or some other.
Franz Riihl, ' Chronologic des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit,' Berlin, 1897, p. 199.
|| Krusch in Neues Archiv, ix. 121. This is from a seventeenth or eighteenth century transcript (Krusch, in Pertz's Archiv der GeseUxchaft fur dltere deutsche Geschichtskunde, viii. 799). It was not until the twelfth century that the era of the Incarnation came into general use in Spain (Neues Archiv, ix. 121).
H Krusch, ib., ix. 113. This is preserved in an eighth - century MS. in the British Museum (Caligula A. xv. ), written in England, according to the British Museum 'Catalogue of Latin MSS.' There is nothing to connect it specially with Italy, and Ideler's inference from its ascription to Cassio- dorus that the Dionvsian era was in ecclesiastical
