identity of Christians in Rome in relation to the Roman state and its Julian
calendar.
At the same time, however, the Easter tables can be interpreted as reflecting
‘vertical’hybridity between the dominant (Roman imperial) culture and
subordinate (Christian) culture. For in the process of harnessing ancient
Latin lunar traditions, the authors of these tables created, perhaps for the
first time in Rome or Italy, lunar calendars that were cyclical and completely
fixed—thus emulating the Julian calendar, which, as has been stated many
times already, was distinctive for beingfixed. The Julian calendar has an
important presence in the Easter tables, if only insofar as all dates in the tables
(e.g. ofluna XIV) are given with reference to the Julian calendar. But the Julian
calendar also determined the design and structure of Roman Easter cycles, in
several specific ways. The epact of Hippolytus’cycle, of thesupputatioRo-
mana, and of later Easter calendars is on the Julian New Year, and it is with
reference to this date that the lunar calendar for every year is constructed.
Furthermore, the determination of the epacts for every year of the cycle is
based entirely on the Julian calendar: in thesupputatioRomana,for example,
the epacts on 1 January succeed each other in regular jumps of 11 days,^100
which means that the lunar year length is dependent on the length of the
Julian year (with the effect that in a Julian leap year the lunar year is extended
by one extra day). Thus, the lunar calendar of the Roman Easter cycles was a
hybrid adaptation of Roman (Latin, Italian) subcultural traditions of lunar
dating to thefixed scheme of the Julian calendar that served as official calendar
in the Roman Empire.
This also leads us to consider that the invention offixed lunar calendars by
third-century Christians was not simply a response to historical conditions
specific to early Christianity, such as the need to calculate the date of Easter; it
was also related to much broader historical processes. The schematization and
fixation of calendars was, as has been frequently observed in this work, a
general trend in the great empires of Antiquity, which culminated with the
Julian calendar of the Roman Empire. The late-antique adaptation of ancient
Latin lunar dating traditions intofixed calendar cycles, such as thesupputatio
Romanaand the lunar column of the Roman calendar of 354CE, themselves
closely linked to the Julian calendar, was part of this dominant, macro-
historical trend.
(^100) Thus at the start of the cycle, on 1 January 298, the epact is 1; in year two, the epact is 12; in
year three, 23. If the epact goes over 30 (i.e. over the limit of days in a lunar month), a subtraction
of 30 is made: thus in year four, the epact is not 34 but 4; in yearfive, 15; etc. Thesaltuslunaeis
an exception, where one unit in the epact is skipped. See Blackburn and Holford-Strevens (1999)
801 – 3.
330 Calendars in Antiquity