The Calendar (8 page)

Shaking up the old order was exactly what Constantine had in mind with his talk about flaming crosses and a powerful new god, though his embrace of Christianity was motivated as much by politics as by faith. It was all part of a grand strategy to forge a new imperial order--political, spiritual, military, economic.

The empire badly needed it. Racked and bloodied by almost a century of civil war, assassination, economic decline and enemies pressing in on all sides, the Roman Empire in 312 would have been unrecognizable to Julius Caesar. Rome itself and its ancient institutions of temple and Senate had been largely eclipsed by the all-powerful imperium, a massive bureaucracy of civil servants, provincial governors and army officers headed by a single man--the emperor. A centralized system originally designed by Augustus, it had worked well during Rome’s golden age in the first and second centuries, when powerful and relatively enlightened rulers such as Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines tended to occupy the throne. By the 300s, however, this old order was all but shattered, with emperors ruling at the whim of the legions, and the empire weakened by a general stagnation as it ceased to expand militarily and economically and became mired in bankrupting wars inside and out.

One alarming sign of internal decay was the sharp decline of science and the arts as the empire diverted resources to the military and people’s minds became less occupied with the length of the year and poetry and more with defending their cities. In the 260s a plague exacerbated the decline, depopulating several provinces. That same decade the cities of the empire began to dismantle stone monuments and amphitheatres to erect walls against invaders. The emperor Aurelian, fearing an attack on Rome itself in the 270s, persuaded the Senate to pay for a massive new wall encircling the city.

Until Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian began reasserting order in the 280s, it looked as if the empire would crack apart. In the 250s the Germanic Marcomanni crossed the Danube frontier and raided southward into northern Italy. To the east the Goths invaded Macedonia and later joined with Scythian hordes to invade Asia Minor and ransack the Black Sea coast. In 260 the emperor Valerian was captured by a revitalized Persian empire, whose armies ravaged Asia Minor until being beaten back. In 267 a fleet of five hundred Gothic warships broke out of the Black Sea and pillaged the Greek coast, sacking Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sparta and Thebes before Emperor Claudius II defeated them in a battle that would have left Italy and Greece defenceless had he lost. All of this had left the empire unmanageable by anyone but a truly exceptional leader.

Constantine was such a man. Reigning 31 years, when most of his immediate predecessors had survived at best a few score months, this last of Rome’s great emperors worked tirelessly to restructure and rejuvenate the empire, efforts that helped to fend off collapse in the West for another century and a half and in the East for over a thousand years.

Born in Naissa--Nis in present-day Serbia--this round-cheeked man with flared nostrils and a square forehead could be ruthless and never hesitated to plunge the empire into war to further his own ambitions. But he also repaired imperial highways and established an efficient messenger network, revamped the legal system, built magnificent basilicas, aqueducts, monuments and churches, and mostly kept the peace. He also sought to transform the imperium itself, completing a shift begun by Aurelian and Diocletian toward an oriental-style monarchy where kings ruled not by the grace of the Senate and the people, or even the army, but as all-powerful despots who claimed to be chosen by the gods (or God).

Aurelian (ruled 270-275) had launched this transformation by founding a cult of a monotheistic sun-god in Rome during the 270s, a precursor to the imposition of Christianity. Building a resplendent new temple to the sun in Rome, Aurelian announced that the sun-god had made him emperor, not the Senate; a transformation cut short by his assassination shortly thereafter. Diocletian (ruled 284-305) furthered this eastern tilt by also embracing the cult of the sun and by dividing the empire into eastern and western halves, with the main centre of power under his control in the East. He gave up the traditional purple toga of the emperor for sumptuous silk robes and jewel-encrusted belts and shoes; and, for the first time since the early days of the Latin kings, a Roman head of state donned a crown. Constantine would complete this easternification by choosing Byzantium as the site for his new capital, Constantinople. Strategically located near the empire’s richest provinces, it was within striking distance of both the western and eastern frontiers.

Constantine would also adopt one of the East’s chief religions, reversing 350 years of largely secular rule--symbolized by Caesar’s calendar--in a move that would soon fuse the political and military might of a still-potent empire with what would become an even more potent state religion.

At first it was not entirely clear
which
religion. During these troubled time Romans embraced several popular sects, most of them from the East--everything from a pseudo-religious brand of Neo-Platonism to Christianity and the worship of the sun. Keenly aware of this diversity, the always expedient Constantine seemed willing to embrace virtually any religion that might serve his political needs, despite his story--told much later--about the Christian god and the flaming cross of gold at the Mulvian Bridge. In fact, at the time he credited his victory over Maxentius to more than one god.

To please the pagans of Rome, he erected the Arch of Constantine, which dedicates his triumph to Rome’s old deities--and remains one of the best-preserved and most imposing triumphal arches in present-day Rome. Constantine also flirted with the popular cult of the sun-god Mithras at the time of the battle since the Mithraists also held sacred a symbol similar to a cross. Certainly such a twin billing would have pleased the large numbers of both Mithraists and Christians in his army.

Only over the course of several years did Christianity gradually win out, perhaps because the Christians offered a more effective power base, or because Constantine found the tenets and organizational structure of the Christian Church easier to co-opt and merge into the existing imperial structure. Another, simpler reason may have involved Constantine’s mother, the British-born Helena (248-328), a former barmaid and a long-time Christian who was mistress (and possibly a first wife) to Constantine’s father. A formidable woman who seldom left her son’s side, Helena lobbied hard for the Christian god, receiving generous sums from her son to build dozens of churches from Judea to Gaul, including the still-standing Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Constantine himself hedged on a full personal commitment to his own state religion until 337, when he was finally baptized on his deathbed.

Whatever Constantine’s true personal beliefs, his fusion of church and state ended what was in essence an experiment begun by Caesar and Augustus to decouple religion from the government--and religion from time. Its impact would utterly transform Europe over the next several centuries, affecting all aspects of life, including the way people kept track of calendar days.

Inevitably Constantine’s new order, like Caesar’s three and a half centuries earlier, got around to putting its stamp on the calendar, in this case by creating a new, religiously inspired system of measuring time. He did this by leaving intact Caesar’s basic calendar of 365 1/4 quarter days and 12 months, while making three major changes within this structure: the introduction of Sunday as a holy day in a new seven-day week; the official recognition of Christian holidays such as Christmas with fixed dates; and the grafting onto the calendar of the Easter celebration, which is not a fixed date, being tied to the Jewish lunar calendar in use when Christ was crucified. The existence of these two types of holy days, fixed and floating, is where Christians get the terms ‘immovable feast’ and ‘movable feast’.

The emperor’s first move to reorder the calendar came in an edict issued in 321, nine years after the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge, when he established Sunday as the first day in a seven-day week--a unit of time unknown in the original Roman calendar of kalends, nones and ides.* According to Constantine’s dictate, all citizens other than farmers were ordered to abstain from work on
dies Solis--
the Sun’s day. He also ordered the courts closed for litigation and the commanders of the army to restrict military exercises so that soldiers could worship the god of their choice.

*The Romans did have an informal cycle of market days held every eight days

Constantine’s selection of Sunday was not without controversy. It blatantly rejected the long-held observance of Saturday as the sabbath by Jews and by Roman pagans, who in the late empire had set aside Saturday--Saturn’s day--as a day to rest and worship.

Saturday at one time was the choice of many Christians as well, since most early believers were Jews who felt obligated to keep their traditional holy day on this seventh day in the Jewish week. But because Jesus was crucified on the
sixth
day of the Jewish week and, according to the Bible, rose from the dead on the first day of the next week--a Sunday--some early Christian leaders decided to shift their sabbath to Sunday, and to mark this day each week by a special service featuring the Eucharist.

But old ways died hard. As late as the turn of the second century, Christian prelates were still complaining about certain Christians who continued to favour a Saturday sabbath, which one bishop condemned in a letter as a ‘superstition’, describing ‘the show they make of the [Jewish] fast days and new moons’ as being ‘ridiculous and undeserving of consideration’.

By the time Constantine issued his edict Christians had largely settled the issue of Saturday versus Sunday, with Sunday the victor. The emperor, however, did not strike a purely Christian line with his new law. By placing the sabbath on the day devoted to the sun in the seven-day cycle of pagan planet-gods, the emperor also curried the favour of the Mithraists and other sun worshippers. Constantine’s official designation of this day in the Roman legal code as
dies Solis
cannot have pleased his new hierarchy of Christian bishops, priests, and laymen, even if some tried to justify the emperor’s decision by insisting that Christ, like the sun, was the light of the world.

As for Constantine’s new seven-day week, it had already been gaining in use and popularity among Romans because of its astrological significance--seven referring to the number of planets (including the sun and the moon) then thought to be in the sky, each of which ‘controlled’ a day of the week. Indeed, the seven-day system was already ancient by Constantine’s day. It seems to have originated circa 700 BC in Babylon, when astrologers assigned their planet-gods to the days of the week--names the Romans replaced with their own planet-gods. For instance, the day of Nabu, the Babylonian god of the scribes, became in Latin the day of Mercurius, the Roman god of communication--and today survives as
mercredi
in French,
miercoles
in Spanish, and so forth across the spectrum of Romance languages (see chart below).

In English, however, the day of Nabu is known as Wednesday because of a curious twist of history: the fact that the seven-day week did not penetrate to Britain until the era of the Anglo-Saxon conquests in the fifth century. At that time the invaders wanted to take on certain Roman trappings but clung to their own pagan religion and gods. So Nabu in Babylon became Mercurius in Rome and Woden--the German (and Viking) god of poetry--in Britain. Centuries later this Mesopotamian-Roman-German-British astrological connection has spread to dozens of countries around the world, as people from Hong Kong to Harare pay homage to otherwise forgotten gods every time they mention the word
Wednesday.

Astrology was so influential in the ancient world that 7 became a kind of mystical number. This was evident not only in the seven-day week but also in the so-called seven ages of man. The astronomer Ptolemy, among others, believed that these ages were tied to the seven planets and their orbits in the earth-centred universe. According to his cosmology, infancy is ruled by the moon, childhood by Mercury, adolescence by Venus, youth by the sun, manhood by Mars, middle age by Jupiter and old age by Saturn. The planets and the number seven were also associated with good and evil omens affecting winds, rain, fair sailing, good crops, bets at the chariot races, warfare and birthdays, for instance in this nursery rhyme:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for its living,
And the child that’s born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

Recently chronobiologists have discovered that the seven-day cycle, like the sleep cycle of days and nights, may also have biological precedents. They say that certain biorhythms in the human body work on seven-day cycles, including variations in heartbeat, blood pressure and response to infection. The potential for rejection of a transplanted organ seems to peak at seven-day intervals. Other organisms, including bacteria, share these basic biorhythms. Possibly this faint tick of biology may be one reason that Mesopotamians, Romans and numerous other cultures, from the Incas of Peru to the Bantu of central and southern Africa, have shaped their activities around a week of 5 to 10 days.