popular, covert resistance to the imposition of the non-lunar, Julian calendar
in the Roman Empire. It is significant to note thatlunadates only appear in
private inscriptions, and are not known to have ever been used for official
purposes. Perhaps this usage expressed no more than a conservative disposi-
tion, among people in Rome and elsewhere in the LatinWest, to preserve their
local, ancient calendrical traditions that had been lunar. But even if not
politically dissident or subversive, we should at least regard the enduring
lunainscriptions as part of an unofficial subculture in the Roman world.
The Christian Easter cyclesChristian Easter cycles in theWest may also be considered an offshoot of the
Latin tradition of lunar calendar reckoning, even though, as noted above, they
appear not to have been used for calculating the lunar dates in funerary
inscriptions. The computation of the date of Easter in early Christianity will
be studied in detail in the next chapter; at present, I shall only examine the
Easter cycles that arose in Rome in the third–fourth centuriesCE.
The festival of Easter originally derived from the Jewish Passover, which
was celebrated on a lunar date, the 14th of Nisan. In most Christian commu-
nities, the established custom by the late second centuryCEwas to celebrate
Easter on the Sunday following the Passover 14th, but the latter remained a
lunar date upon which the date of Easter Sunday depended. It is for this reason
that, from the early third century, Christians began to determine the dates of
Easter on the basis of calculated schemes. Thefirst Christian cycles for
determining the dates ofluna XIVand hence of Easter were composed in
theWest, more specifically in Rome—which itself may be of some signifi-
cance.^89 The earliest, attributed to Hippolytus, was a table of 112 years
(^89) According to the annals of Eutychius (Melkite Patriarch of Alexandria in 933–40), letters
‘about the computation of the Pascha of the Christians, and about the Fast, and about how it can
be worked out from the Pascha of the Jews’, were sent already by Demetrius, bishop of
Alexandria (in 189–232), to the bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome (Breydy 1985: i. 59–
60, ii. 50,}172). This passage has commonly been taken to imply afixed Easter cycle, which
Coptic and Ethiopic tradition (Neugebauer 1979: 92–4) assumed to be the later, normative
Alexandrian 19-year cycle (on which see further Ch. 7), whereas Richard (1974: 308–9) assumed
it to be an eight-year cycle or octaeteris, which, on any of these interpretations, would have
predated Hippolytus’cycle. However, it is far from clear that afixed cycle is intended by
Eutychius: for although‘computation’usually refers, in this context, tofixed cycles, it is quite
possible that‘working it out from the Jewish Pascha’implies the early Christian practice of
determining the date of Easter from year to year on the basis of when Jews happened to observe
Passover (a practice known as‘observing Easter with the Jews’, on which see Ch. 7). Moreover,
the reliability of this very late source is open to questioning, particularly as itfinds no parallel in
any early source such as Eusebius (Grumel 1960: 165–6;paceLejbowicz 2006: 11 and n. 29 and
Mosshammer 2008: 110–16, who follow Richard and argue for the reliability of Eutychius, but
fail to provide any positive evidence of this cycle or of any other Easter cycle in early 3rd-c.
326 Calendars in Antiquity