Text
Cassius Dio 37.18:
The custom, however, of referring the days to the seven stars called planets was instituted by the Egyptians, but is now found among all mankind, though its adoption has been comparatively recent; at any rate the ancient Greeks never understood it, so far as I am aware. But since it is now quite the fashion with mankind generally and even with the Romans themselves, and is to them already in a way an ancestral tradition, I wish to write briefly of it, telling how and in what way it has been so arranged. I have heard two explanations, which are not difficult of comprehension, it is true, though they involve certain theories. For if you apply the so-called “principle of the tetrachord” (which is believed to constitute the basis of music) to these stars, by which the whole universe of heaven is divided into regular intervals, in the order in which each of them revolves, and beginning at the outer orbit assigned to Saturn, then omitting the next two name the lord of the fourth, and after this passing over two others reach the seventh, and you then go back and repeat the process with the orbits and their presiding divinities in this same manner, assigning them to the several days, you will find all the days to be in a kind of musical connection with the arrangement of the heavens. This is one of the explanations given; the other is as follows. If you begin at the first hour to count the hours of the day and of the night, assigning the first to Saturn, the next to Jupiter, the third to Mars, the fourth to the Sun, the fifth to Venus, the sixth to Mercury, and the seventh to the Moon, according to the order of the cycles which the Egyptians observe, and if you repeat the process, covering thus the whole twenty-four hours, you will find that the first hour of the following day comes to the Sun. And if you carry on the operation throughout the next twenty-four hours in the same manner as with the others, you will dedicate the first hour of the third day to the Moon, and if you proceed similarly through the rest, each day will receive its appropriate god. This, then, is the tradition.
Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Cassius Dio 37.18
Bibliography
| Cary 1969, III 128-131 | Cary, Earnest. Dio's Roman History. On the basis of the version of Herbert Baldwin Foster. 9 Vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, London: Heinemann 1969. |
Amar Annus
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0001164.php
|
