We’re frequently reminded that an exercised mind retards the
onset of senility. Minds aged eighty or thereabouts and higher tend to notice
stories like that; the ballpoint marks the article for closer reading. Keeping
the mind sharp is our excuse, hereabouts, for working crossword puzzles, as in “you
learn something new every day,” e.g. that OREO is an almost indispensably
useful word in crossword puzzles. Well, the other day, we had the following
clue: July 7, e.g. Brigitte and I
always do puzzles together; and what with our respective backgrounds, we fill
in our respective gaps of knowledge and never fail to solve a puzzle. This
time, again, we found the answer to that clue—but only by finding the other
words that intersected with it. The answer was NONES. But what does that mean?
Nones, of course,
vaguely hinted at the ninth canonical hour, but the clue was July 7. So how do
we get from 9 to 7. To get an answer to that illustrates what might be called
the useful activity of “extended
crossword puzzle solving.” One has to research the subject. Well, Brigitte and
I are both quite familiar with the Ides of March; assassinations of important
people have a way of lingering in racial memory. We also knew that it was the
15th of the month. Oddly enough, as we discovered, counting backward from 15,
with 15 being 1, the 9th day turns out to be the 7th. So if you count back from
the Ides of July by nine, including that day in your count, the ninth (nonae in Latin) day will be the 7th. Nones
is always the 9th day of the month in
the Julian calendar—but it falls on the 7th of the month only in March, May,
July, and October—because the Ides falls on the 15th. In all other months, the
Ides fall on the 13th and hence Nones is on the 5th of the month!
Having discovered this, we learned that Roman naming of the
days was rather awkward. The Romans only had three “named” days, Kalends (the
first day of the month), Nones (5th or 7th depending on the month), and Ides
(15th or 13th, again depending on the months). All other days were defined with
reference to these three. The following table shows the naming conventions,
which seem very hard to remember for us, for the month of July:
1st
|
Kalends (of July)
|
17th
|
Day 15 before Kalends
|
2nd
|
Day 5 before Nones
|
18th
|
Day 14 before Kalends
|
3rd
|
Day 4 before Nones
|
19th
|
Day 13 before Kalends
|
4th
|
Day 3 before Nones
|
20th
|
Day 12 before Kalends
|
5th
|
Day 2 before Nones
|
21st
|
Day 11 before Kalends
|
6th
|
Day before Nones
|
22nd
|
Day 10 before Kalends
|
7th
|
Nones
|
23rd
|
Day 9 before Kalends
|
8th
|
Day 7 before Ides
|
24th
|
Day 8 before Kalends
|
9th
|
Day 6 before Ides
|
25th
|
Day 7 before Kalends
|
10th
|
Day 5 before Ides
|
26th
|
Day 6 before Kalends
|
11th
|
Day 4 before Ides
|
27th
|
Day 5 before Kalends
|
12th
|
Day 3 before Ides
|
28th
|
Day 4 before Kalends
|
13th
|
Day 2 before Ides
|
29th
|
Day 3 before Kalends
|
14th
|
Day before Ides
|
30th
|
Day 2 before Kalends
|
15th
|
Ides
|
31st
|
Day before Kalends
|
16th
|
Day 16 before Kalends
|
1st
|
Kalends (of August)
|
The Romans used a standard annotation to name a day. Lets
take the 13th of July here. They would write that as “a.d. II Id. Iul.” Spelled
out: “ante diem II, Ides, Iulius.” Ante
diem stands for “day before”; it
amuses me, however, that A.D. was used in calendars once—and still is, but with
a different meaning. Iulius, is, of
course, our July. The phrasing on the day immediately before the named days
(e.g. July 14) was “prid. Id. Iul.”; the prid.
is pridie and means “the day before.”
Keeping track of the days, particularly in the second half
of each month, was rather a chore, it seems, best left to scribes who had desks
with appropriate writing instruments on which to record time's passage.
Now, knowing that it takes such exercises to ward off the
onrush of senility makes you kind of wonder just how bad senility really might
be…