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that a usage which began after 30 B.C. should in a very few years have obtained such a hold, that an Italian poet should not only know it, but utilize it in a poem which he intended to be understood by the general reader. But I have tried to shew that this ordinary interpretation 1s not the only possible one, and since if we rule it out we get no certain evidence of the week till a time approaching A.D. 79, I think this possibility of dating the week from Sunday, August 31st, 30 B.C. is just worth consideration[1]. It should, however, be remembered that, if it were accepted, we should still have to regard the coincidence of the Sabbath with the Saturn's day of the new 'chronocratory' as a confirmatory factor. If, on the other hand, we adopt my first suggestion that the precedent of the Sabbath was the one fact which gave the astrologers their starting-point, we could throw the date considerably earlier. In fact, so far as this goes, the planetary week might have originated at any
- ↑ It is an argument of some weight against this and indeed against Dion's theory of the Egyptian origin of the planetary week that the Alexandrian Jew Philo (c. 25 B.C.–A.D. 50) never mentions the planetary days or hours. This is not an ordinary case of negative evidence, for Philo several times and particularly in a special treatise on the number seven (de septenario) ransacks the universe for examples of the predominance of the sacred number. He certainly means to be exhaustive. But while of course he dwells both on the number of the planets and of the days of the week, he never brings the two into connexion. The fact is odd anyhow, but it would be odder still if the system was pre-eminently Egyptian.
