~ 25 ~
one is sure to know it without formally learning it. I never heard of school-children to-day being taught the names of the week-days. And this again is natural enough, for while our civil life is regulated by the week, it is, as we shall see, the most remarkable fact about the planetary week that it spread without any civil or official recognition—that nothing happened in it, as things happen to us on Sunday.
Further we may note that an inscription belonging to A.D. 205 has been found in Karlsburg in Transylvania, where the date is given not only by the year and the month, but also by the weekday, in this case Monday[1]. Another, not quite so complete, but probably belonging to A.D. 231, comes from Kelheim in Bavaria, while representations of the Seven in week-order some of which at least are ascribed by experts to this period have been found in the Rhineland[2]. All these go to shew that Dion's statement applies not only to the centre of the empire, but to its most outlying parts.
Finally, before we leave the early decades of the third century, we may listen to the witness of the Christian Church. Tertullian, writing about or possibly before A.D. 200, in two very similar passages scoffs at the pagan week[3]. The details of these passages, as so often with this most difficult of writers, are obscure. But the
- ↑ V. Schürer, p. 33.
- ↑ Ib.
- ↑ Apologeticum, 16; Ad nationes, I, 13.
