apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

DATE OF THE MARTYRDOM. 68 1
of thirty-one days had two firsts, so that ii.s real third was nominally
its second. This trick of repeating the same day in order to preserve
the same total has an analogy in the
treatment of February in leap year
with the Romans
in the Julian calendar. It was a point of religion
not to exceed the twenty-eight da3's in February, and therefore one
particular day, vi Kal. Mart. ( = Feb. 24), was repeated (bissextum).
I shall have to return to the phenomena of these Ephesian and Asiatic
calendars again at a later point.
It is doubtless this same Epheso-Asiatic calendar, which is contemplated
in the inscription at Stratonicea in Caria (Lebas and Waddington
no. 514; comp. C. I. G. 3.
2"] 22),g\v'mg memoria tec/mica ior the numbers
of days in the successive months in exact accordance with these; and it
is
worthy of notice, though this may possibly be an accident, that one
of the months in the ' Asiatic ' calendar bears the name Stratonicus.
We meet also with the same adaptation of the Julian calendar in
Bithynia (Ideler i. p. 421), in Crete {il>. p. 426), and in Cyprus {il>.
p. 427).
This calendar also agrees with the statement of Galen, himself a
Pergamene, who spent some time at Smyrna and was about 25 years
old at the time of Polycarp's martyrdom. As I shall have occasion
to revert to this statement more than once, I shall save time by giving
it fully now.
Galen {Comm. in Hippocr. Epidem. i. Op. xvii. p. 19 sq, ed.
Kiihn) is explaining why Hippocrates dates by the equinoxes, the
motions of the stars, etc., rather than by the months. The motions
of the celestial bodies, he says, are the same for all men, whereas each
nation has its own months. Thus, if Hippocrates had mentioned
Dius, it would have been intelligible to the Macedonians, but not to
the Athenians. The reader however has only to remember that the
year is cut up into four parts by the equinoxes and the solstices, and
to know that the autumnal equinox coincides with the beginning of
Dius, the winter solstice with the beginning of Peritius', the vernal
equinox with the beginning of Ai temisius,
the summer solstice with the
beginning of Lous. He will then understand the computations of
'
'
Hippocrates. But,' he continues, it is plainly necessary that the
months should be reckoned not according to the moon, as in most of
the Greek cities at the present time, but, according to the sun, as in
all the Asiatic cities and in
many of the nations, and so the year is
reckoned by the Romans, the whole of it
being
divided into twelve
1
F"or Treparos, which stands in the Hepirlov with Ussher and others,
present text, we should doubtless read