We now turn to the Catania (Sicily) inscription of 383CE, a funerary
inscription erected by a Jew, Aurelius Samuel, in memory of his wife, which
is dated as follows:
...fatum complebit XII Kal(endas) Novebres, diae Veneris, luna octaba, Mer-
obaudes iterum et Satornino consulibus...
...(she) completed her allotted life on the 12th (before) the Kalends of
November, Friday, lunar day 8, when Merobaudes for the second time and
Saturninus were consuls...This extensive dating, with a Julian date (which must be corrected to XIII Kal,
or 20 October : see above, n. 50), weekday, lunar day, and consular year, is
quite normal for late Roman inscriptions and shows no sign, atfirst sight, of
any Jewish calendar. Thelunadate, as has been established above, was an early
Latin tradition, which by the late fourth century had come into common (but
clearly not exclusively) Christian use. The practice of recording a detailed date
of death was itself a distinctly Christian funerary epigraphic tradition.^129
But although the date is thus made up entirely of Roman and/or Latin
components andfits into a distinctly Christian epigraphic tradition, the rest of
this inscription is, in more than one way, very distinctly Jewish. The dedicator
has a biblical name; the inscription begins with a line of Hebrew, it goes on to
refer to‘the law which the Lord gave the Jews’, and it is footed with the
standard Jewish symbol ofmenorot(candelabra). The Jewish character of the
inscription as a whole makes it most likely that its lunar date, although
expressed with a traditional Latin formula, represented also a date in Aurelius
Samuel’s Jewish calendar: for it would have been highly confusing if, for the
Jewish calendar and festivals, a different lunar reckoning was used. But this
effectively means that his Jewish calendar would have followed the same
principles as Latin lunar dating: in particular, as can be inferred from the
calendrical data in the inscription (Stern 2001: 136), the lunar month would
have begun not at the appearance of the new moon, but rather at the
conjunction. As a result, the dates of Jewish festivals would have been defined
on the basis of a specifically Latin convention of lunar reckoning.^130
The hybridity of the Jewish lunar calendar implicit in this inscription was
not the product of‘vertical’relations between dominant and subordinate
(^129) Ibid. 132–6 and nn. 107–8. In Jewish funerary inscriptions, similarly detailed dates of this
kind are only attested in the contemporary and later Aramaic inscriptions from Zoar (ibid.
87 – 98, 146–53), which raises the possibility, there also, of some Christian influence.
(^130) The lunar date in this inscription does not tally with thesupputatioRomana(the most
likely Easter cycle to have been used by Christians in late 4th-c. Sicily) or the Alexandrian cycle
(ibid. 135 n. 110); but this has no bearing on whether or not Aurelius borrowed his date from
Christian sources—a question that remains entirely open—since discrepancy from Easter cycles
is common also in Christianlunainscriptions (see above, n. 81).
340 Calendars in Antiquity