(Vol. viii., pp. 198. 250.)
In replying to Professor DE MORGAN'S last communication on this subject, it
may be as well, in order to avoid future misunderstanding, to revert
briefly to my original question. I pointed out Ben Jonson's assertion,
through a character in one of his plays, that about the beginning of the
seventeenth century, it was the custom to regard the legal rights of
majority as commencing with six o'clock A.M., and I asked to have that
assertion reconciled with our present commencement at midnight, and with
the statement that the latter is in accordance with the old reckoning.
Thus I started with the production of affirmative evidence, to rebut which
I cannot find, in the replies of PROFESSOR DE MORGAN, any negative evidence
stronger than his individual opinion, which, however eminent in other
respects, has undoubtedly the disadvantage of being two hundred years later
than the contemporary evidence produced by me. I afterwards cited Arthur
Hopton as authority that lawyers in England, in his time, did make use of a
day which he classifies as that of the Babylonians; but inasmuch as he
apparently restricts its duration to twelve hours, whereas all ancient
writers concur in assigning to the Babylonians a day of twenty-four hours,
there is evidently a mistake somewhere, attributable either to Hopton or
his printers.
This mistake may have arisen either from a misprint, or from a
transposition of a portion of the sentence.
The supposition of a misprint is favoured by the circumstance that Hopton
was, at the time, professing to describe natural days of _twenty-four_
hours; of these there are four great classes of commencement, from the four
principal quarters of the day; viz. from midnight, from mid-day, from
sun-setting and from sun-rising. Hopton had already assigned three of them
to different nations, and the fourth he had properly assigned, so far as
its commencement at sunrise was concerned, to the Babylonians. What, then,
can be more probable than that he intended this day also, like the rest, to
be of twenty-four hours' duration; and that the words "holding till
sun-setting" ought, perhaps, to have been printed "holding till
sun-_rising_?"
This way of reconciling seeming anomalies, by the supposition of probable
misprints, receives great encouragement in the occasional occurrence of
similar mistakes in the most carefully printed modern books. I lately
noticed, while reading Sir James Ross's _Southern Voyage of Discovery_, a
work printed by the Admiralty, and on which extraordinary typographical
care had been bestowed, the following, at page 121. of vol. ii.:
"It was full moon on the 15th of September, at 5.38 A.M."
But the context shows that "full moon" ought to have been printed _new
moon_, and that "5.38 A.M." outlet to be 5.38 P.M.: and what renders these
two mistakes the more remarkable is, that they have no sort of connexion,
nor is the occurrence of the one in any way explanatory of the other.
Now, the misprint of "sun-setting" for _sun-rising_, which I am supposing
in Hopton's book, would be much more likely of occurrence than these,
because these form part of a series of carefully examined data from which a
scientific deduction is to be drawn, while Hopton's is a mere loose
description. And, moreover, a twenty-four hour day, commencing and ending
with _sunrise_, does not, after all, appear to be so wholly unknown to
English law as PROF. DE MORGAN supposes, since Sir Edward Coke, to whom the
professor especially refers, describes such a day in these words:
"Dies naturalis constat ea 24 horis et continet diem solarem et noctem;
and therefore in Inditements for Burglary and the like, we say in nocte
ejusdem diei. Iste dies naturalis est spatium in quo sol progreditur ab
oriente in occidentem et ab occidente iterum in orientem."
{542}
But there is another way of reconciling the discrepancy--Hopton may not
have intended the words "holding till sun-setting" to apply to the
Babylonians, but only to "the lawyers in England," whose day, he says,
_commenced_ at the same time as the Babylonian day. The transposition of
the words in question to the end of the sentence would give such a meaning,
viz. "The Babylonians begin their day at sun-rising, and so do our lawyers
count it in England, holding till sun-setting." Altered in this way, the
latter clause does not necessarily apply to the Babylonians.
Here again we have a lawyers' day almost verbally identical with one
assigned to them by Sir Edward Coke: "Dies artificialis sive solaris
incipit in ortu solis et desinit in occasu, and of this the law of England
takes hold _in many cases_."
Nor does Lord Coke strengthen or vary his description in the least, when
speaking of the day commencing at midnight; he uses again the same
expression with regard to it, "The Egyptians and Romans from midnight, and
so doth the law of England _in many cases_."
Hence the authority of Chief Justice Coke, is at best only neutral; for who
will undertake to prove to which of these classes of "many cases" Lord Coke
meant to assign the attainment of majority?
In support of Ben Jonson's testimony, it may be urged that the midnight
initial of the day was itself derived by us from the Romans; and it is
nearly certain that _they_ did not perform any legal act, connected with
birthday, until the commencement of the _dies solis_.
A proof of this may be observed in the discussion by Aulus Gellius (_Noct.
Attic._, iii. 2.) as to which day, the preceding or the following, a
person's birth, happening in the night, was to be attributed. He quotes a
fragment from Varro,--
"Homines qui ex media nocte ad proximam mediam noctem his horis XXIV
nati sunt, uno die nati dicuntur."
On which Gellius remarks:
"From these words it may be observed that the arrangement of (birth)
days was such, that to any person born after sunset, and before
midnight, the day from which that night had proceeded should be the
birthday; but to any person born during the last six hours of the
night, the day which should succeed that night must be the birthday."
This explanation might seem almost purposely written in reply to some such
difficulty as occurred to PROFESSOR DE MORGAN (_ante_, p. 250.), when he
remarks that, if birthday were to be confined to daylight, "a child not
born by daylight would have no birthday at all!" But since it was notorious
amongst the Romans that the civil day began at midnight, such a _quaeri
solitum_ as this could never have been mooted, if the birthday observance
had not been known and acknowledged to have a different commencement. In
continuation of the same subject, Gellius proceeds to quote another passage
from Varro, which I shall also repeat, not only as furnishing still farther
proof that the Romans did not regard the night as forming any part of the
birthday, but also as affording an opportunity of recording an opinion as
to the interpretation of Varro's words, which, in this passage, do not
appear to have ever been properly understood.
After stating that many persons in Umbria reckon from noon to noon as one
and the same day, Varro remarks:
"Quod quidem nimis absurdum est; nam qui calendarum hora sexta natus
est apud Umbros, dies ejus natalis videri debebit et calendarum
dimidiatus, et qui est post calendas dies ante horam ejusdem diei
sextam."
Now why should _beginning one's birthday at noon_ appear so absurd to
Varro? Simply because the hours of the night were not then supposed to be
included in the birthday at all, and therefore Varro could not _realize_
the idea of a birthday continued through the night.
He says that, according to the Umbrian reckoning, a person born on any day
_after_ the point of noon, would have only half a birthday on that day; and
for the other half, he would have to take the forenoon of the following
day. Varro had no notion of joining the afternoon of one day to the
forenoon of another, because he looked upon the unbroken presence of the
sun as the very essence of a natal day.
Nothing can be plainer than that this was the true nature of the absurdity
alluded to; but it would not suit the prejudices of the commentators,
because it would compel them to admit that _sexta hora must have been in
the afternoon_, in opposition to their favourite dogma that it was always
in the forenoon.
For if Varro had intended to represent sexta hora in the _forenoon_, he
would have said that the other half-day must be taken from the _after_noon
of the _pridie_, instead of saying, as he does say, that it must be taken
from the _fore_noon of the _postridie_ of the Calends.
Consequently, Varro means by "qui Calendarum hora sexta natus est," a
person born in the sixth hour of the day of the Calends; the sixth hour
being that which immediately succeeded noon--the _media hora_ of Ovid. But
what Varro more immediately means by it is, not any particular point of
time, but generally any time _after noon_ on the day of the Calends.
That the true position of _sexta hora_, when implying duration, was in the
afternoon, has long been a conviction of mine; and I have elsewhere
produced undeniable evidence that it was so {543} considered by ancient
authors. But this passage from Varro is a new and hitherto unnoticed proof,
and certainly it ought to be a most convincing one, because it seems
impossible to give Varro's words a rational meaning without the admission
of this hypothesis, while with it everything is clear and consistent.
The commentators, driven by the necessity I have just pointed out, either
to admit the afternoon position of _sexta hora_, or to abstain from reading
it as a _space_ of time, have attempted to force a meaning by reading
_sexta hora_ in its other sense, an absolute mathematical point, the
_punctus ipse_ of noon.
In so doing they have not scrupled to libel Varro's common sense; they
represent his idea of the absurd to consist in the embarrassment that would
be caused by the birth occurring at the critical moment of change,--split
as it were _upon the knife-edge of noon_; so that, in the doubt that would
arise as to which day it should belong, it must be attributed partly to
both!
This interpretation is so monstrous, and so evidently wide of the meaning
of the words, that its serious imputation would scarcely be believed, if it
were not embalmed in the Delphin edition of Aulus Gellius, where we read
the following footnote referring to the _argumentum ad absurdum_ of Varro:
"Infirmum omnino argumentum, et quod perinde potest in ipsum Varronem
retorqueri. Quid enim? Si quis apud Romanos Calendis hora vi. noctis
fuerit natus, nonne pariter dies ejus natalis videri debebit, et partim
Calendarum, et partim ejus dici qui sequetur?"
It is not worth while to inquire what may have been the precise dilemma
contemplated by the writer of this note, since most certainly it is not a
reflex of Varro's meaning. The word _dimidiatus_ is completely cushioned,
although Gellius himself has a chapter upon it a little farther on in the
same volume.
The anomaly that amused Varro was the necessity of piecing together two
halves not belonging to the same individual day and with the hiatus of a
night between them; a necessity that would assuredly appear most absurd to
one who had no other idea of birthday than the twelve consecutive hours of
artificial day, which he would call "the natural day."
This proneness of the Romans to look upon the _dies solis_ as the only
effective part of the twenty-four hours, is again apparent in their
commencement of horary notation at sunrise, six hours later than the actual
commencement of the day. And in our own anomalous repetition of twice
twelve, we may still trace the remains of the twelve-hour day; we have
changed the initial point, but we have retained the measure of duration.
It is, however, certain that the two methods of reckoning time continued
for a long time to exist contemporaneously. Hence it became necessary to
distinguish one from the other _by name_, and thus the notation from
midnight gave rise, as I have remarked in one of my papers on Chaucer, to
the English idiomatic phrase "of the clock;" or the reckoning of the clock,
commencing at midnight, as distinguished from Roman equinoctial hours,
commencing at six o'clock A.M. This was what Ben Jonson was meaning by
attainment of majority at _six o'clock_, and not, as PROFESSOR DE MORGAN
supposes, "probably a certain sunrise." Actual sunrise had certainly
nothing to do with the technical commencement of the day in Ben Jonson's
time. For convenience sake, six o'clock had long been taken _as
conventional sunrise all the year round_; and even amongst the Romans
themselves, equinoctial hours were frequently used at all seasons. Actual
sunrise, in after times, had only to do with "hours inequall," which are
said to have fallen into disuse, in common life, so early as the fifth or
sixth century.
I trust I may now have shown reasonable grounds for the belief that Ben
Jonson may, after all, have had better authority than his license as a
dramatic poet, for dating the attainment of majority at six o'clock A.M.;
and that nothing short of contemporary evidence directly contradictory of
the custom so circumstantially alluded to by him, ought to be held
sufficient to throw discredit upon it. It is one of the singular
coincidences attending the discussion of this matter by Gellius, that, at
the conclusion of the chapter I have been expatiating upon, he should cite
the authority of Virgil; observing that the testimony of _poets_ is very
valuable upon such subjects, even when veiled in the obscurity of poetic
imagery.