Page:Colson - The Week (1926, IA weekessayonorigi0000fhco).djvu/43

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second century^[1]. We may now pass on to the first, and here we have the testimony of no less a name than Plutarch^[2]. In the great body of his philosophical and general works which usually go under the name of Moralia, works which, though they have not exercised on posterity the same influence as the famous Lives, are a treasury of information on the culture and religion of his time, there is a set of essays in the form of dialogues called Symposia or Table-talk.

↑ Among the monumental and inscriptional evidence there is probably a certain amount or perhaps much which may belong to this century or even to the preceding one. The only literary point known to me and not included above is to be found in one Ampelius, whose Liber Memorialis, though it does not mention the week, in describing the planets puts them in week-order. There are strong reasons for placing Ampelius in the second century, but this early date is not universally accepted.

I should perhaps also mention an 'oracle' adduced by Porphyry the celebrated Neoplatonist and quoted from him by Eusebius (Praeparatio Evangelica, V, 14, 1). This oracle, which is in a fragmentary form and as it stands partly corrupt, probably named the seven planet-gods, though not in week-order, and bade the worshipper invoke them. It certainly (and this is the point which concerns us) bade him invoke the Sun on the Sun's day and the Moon on the Moon's day. Porphyry wrote somewhere in the second half of the third century, but it is a fair supposition that the oracle dates from a considerably earlier time. It may probably therefore belong to the second century and may quite conceivably be as early as any evidence of the planetary week. But the matter is too uncertain for any stress to be laid upon it.
↑ Sympos. IV, 7. The greater part of Plutarch's life belongs to the first century, but possibly this work may date from the earliest years of the second.

[1] Among the monumental and inscriptional evidence there is probably a certain amount or perhaps much which may belong to this century or even to the preceding one. The only literary point known to me and not included above is to be found in one Ampelius, whose Liber Memorialis, though it does not mention the week, in describing the planets puts them in week-order. There are strong reasons for placing Ampelius in the second century, but this early date is not universally accepted.

I should perhaps also mention an 'oracle' adduced by Porphyry the celebrated Neoplatonist and quoted from him by Eusebius (Praeparatio Evangelica, V, 14, 1). This oracle, which is in a fragmentary form and as it stands partly corrupt, probably named the seven planet-gods, though not in week-order, and bade the worshipper invoke them. It certainly (and this is the point which concerns us) bade him invoke the Sun on the Sun's day and the Moon on the Moon's day. Porphyry wrote somewhere in the second half of the third century, but it is a fair supposition that the oracle dates from a considerably earlier time. It may probably therefore belong to the second century and may quite conceivably be as early as any evidence of the planetary week. But the matter is too uncertain for any stress to be laid upon it.

[2] Sympos. IV, 7. The greater part of Plutarch's life belongs to the first century, but possibly this work may date from the earliest years of the second.

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