in advance is suggested at least in Athanasius’festal letter for 346CE, in which
he announces the date of Easter as Sunday 30 March, and not (as some might
have argued) 23 March, on the grounds that the former date had been made
known by everyone at the‘holy synod’—which means presumably the synod
of Serdica, two years before this letter was written.^134
This Easter date was clearly an Alexandrian concession to Rome. The date
of 23 March, which Athanasius vehemently rejected (thereby betraying, per-
haps, that normally this date should have been followed), was actually re-
quired by the Alexandrian cycle, but it was too early for Rome in terms of its
solar (and probably also lunar) limits; whereas 30 March was the Roman date
of Easter.^135 By then, in 346, Gregory was dead; although Athanasius did not
return to Alexandria until later that year, the time was right for compromise.
A further compromise was made in 349, when Athanasius set Easter on 26
March because—as explicitly stated here the Index—the Romans insisted on
Easter limits of 26 March–21 April.^136 According to the Alexandrian cycle,
indeed, it should have been 23 April, outside the Roman limit. The earlier date
of 26 March was unacceptable to Alexandria, because it would have assumed a
pre-equinoctialluna XIV, on 19 March; but as 23 April was too late for Rome,
Athanasius compromised.^137
(^134) Festal Letter 18: Cureton (1848) 38 (Syriac pagination). The Syriacshaddar(lit.‘sent’),
where one would expect a word for‘proclaim’, suggests that this date was not just proclaimed at
the synod but also sent or disseminated (this word is wrongly translated in the Latin,PG26: 1423
B, as‘definierunt’, which Camplani 1989: 110 appears to have followed; whilst the text in
quotation marks in Hefele and Leclerq 1907: 805 bears no relation to the original at all). 135
So according to both thesupputatioRomanaand the calendar of 354: see Hefele and
Leclerq (1907), Richard (1974) 331. The heading of the Festal Letter gives XXI for the lunar date
of 30 March (Martin and Albert 1985: 330–1; the Index reads‘twenty-four’, clearly an error, ibid.
244 – 5), although according to the Alexandrian cycle it should have beenXXII. It seems that in
this heading, as in the Index for the year 333CE(see n. 130), the lunar date was deliberately
altered by one day in order to make it look as though the Alexandrian Easter lunar limits of
XV–XXI were not transgressed.
(^136) Martin and Albert 1985: 248–9; see above, n. 123.
(^137) In 350CE, our sources suggest that Easter was held on different dates, even though
Athanasius was still in control of his see in Alexandria: the Index gives the date of 8 April
(Martin and Albert 1985: 250–1), whereas in Rome, according to both thesupputatioRomana
and the calendar of 354, it was 15 April; 8 April would have been too early for Rome because it
coincided withluna XV. This disagreement, inflagrant contradiction to the decree of the Serdica
Council, demands an explanation. Richard (1974) 330–1, followed by Lejbowicz (2008) 298 n. 92
= 2010: 28 n. 92, put forward the theory that Athanasius was only prepared to respect Rome’s
solar limits of 25 March–21 April, but not its lunar limits, which would explain why he did not
compromise with Rome on this occasion. The question, however, is whether the date in the
Index can be treated, in this case, as authentic. Although fragments of Athanasius’festal letter for
that year have been preserved—regrettably, without the date of Easter—the letter is not referred
to in the Index. This may suggest that the letter was not known to the author of the Index, who
would have calculated instead the date of 8 April retrospectively, on the sole basis of the
Alexandrian 19-year cycle (for a similar argument regarding the years 357 and 360, see Camplani
1989: 111–12 and below, n. 146).
408 Calendars in Antiquity