Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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The Latin expressions I merely copy from Censorinus, Ch. 24, and insert in brackets the additions made by Macrob., Sat. I, 3, 16 ff. Tempus quod huic—i. e. nox media—proximum est vocatur de media nocte (media noctis inclinatio), sequitur gallicinium, cum galli canere incipiunt, dein conticinium, cum conticuerunt; tunc ante lucem, et sic diluculum, cum sole nondum orto iam lucet. Secundum diluculum vocatur mane cum lux videtur sole orto, post hoc ad meridiem, tunc meridies, quod est medii diei nomen, inde de meridie (inde—i. e. a meridie—tempus occiduum), hinc suprema ... post supremam sequitur vespera ante ortum scilicet—this must be before the appearance of the star—eius stellae, quam Plautus vesperuginem ... appellat. There are also ortus and occasus solis, crepusculum. This terminology is poor and applies almost exclusively to the daylight. In ancient Rome the edifices of the Forum are said to have served as sun-dials. A servant of the consul proclaimed noon “when the sun peeped between the Rostra and the Graecostasis; when the sun sank from the Maenian column to the prison he proclaimed evening, but only on clear days”[150]. With the advance of civilisation the Greek terms for the twelve hours of the day, each of which varied in length according to the time of the year, became customary, a fact which is connected with the spread of sun- and water-clocks[151]. Hence arises in the Middle Ages the terminology derived from the daily mass (hora canonica)[152]. In daily life there was often a recurrence to primitive methods. I borrow a few examples of a quite primitive character from the early medieval tract Peregrinatio Aetheriae:—‘the hour when people can recognise each other’[153], ‘when the crow of cocks begins’[154], ‘from the first cock-crow’[155], etc., but also hora tertia, quinta, sexta (noon).