According to our own ordinary modern system of counting time, the legal Day is divided into 24 hours, and the hour is an unvarying and absolute duration of time ; while the length of the day and the night are continually changing within certain limits (according to latitude), the day containing more hours and the night fewer at midsummer, and conversely at midwinter, while at the spring and the autumn equinox day and night are equal, and contain each 12 hours.
There are only the scantiest traces of such a meaning for the word ‘hour’ in ancient times,
and it never occurs in popular usage, though it seems to have been known to astronomers from a very early time. The length of the ordinary ancient ‘hour’ varied continually from day to day through- out the year. The day, the period between sun- rise and sunset, was divided into twelve equal parts called ‘hours’ (Jn 11%). The division was marked by the progress of the shadow from line to line on the sun-dial; and the progress was more widely published in houses of a more preten- tious character by some such device as the blow- ing of a trumpet. In Trimalchio’s house (Pet- ronius, p. 26)* the trumpeter was an established institution ; and in the old German Imperial city of Goslar the same ancient custom was maintained by the public authorities down almost to the pres- ent time: not many years ago, and perhaps still, the trumpeter in Goslar sounded every quarter of an hour, for the division of time is carried out more minutely in modern than in ancient times.
There is hardly any trace in popular Greco- Roman usage of any definite division of time shorter than the hour: horw momento, ‘in the motion of an hour,’ i.e. the time that the shadow on the dial takes to creep from one line to the next, was a customary phrase for a brief interval (Horace, Sat. i. 1. 16). Hence the word ‘hour? is often used in the NT to indicate a point of time, where the more emphatic expression of modern language would require some such term as“ instant’ or ‘moment,’ e.g. Mt 8% 97, Mk 144, Lk 12% 40, Jn 171. But this usage may really be much more emphatic than it appears at first sight. The Latin word hore certainly, and perhaps also the Greek &pa, are often used in the sense, not of the period that the shadow takes to creep from line to line on the dial, but of the brief moment in which the shadow crosses the line. Bilfinger has conclusively proved, contrary to the opinion of almost ail other scholars, that the latter was the more fre- quent sense of the terms in Latin, hora prima, hora secunda: these generally indicated, not the whole time which the shadow required to move from the starting-point at sunrise to the first line, and from the first to the second line, but the moment + when the shadow reached the first or the second line. Hence hora sexta is frequently found, and almost always has the precise and exact sense ‘at the point of noon.’
But Bilfinger tries to push too far the view which he champions. There are certainly some cases in which hora prima means the whole period from sunrise to the moment when the shadow on the dial reaches the first division. In truth, the ancients were far from being so accurate as modern people are; and probably many of them were hardly conscious of any difference between these two meanings, and used the term hora prima so
loosely that they could hardly have specified which
of the two meanings they had in mind. We ought not to try to make them out more accurate than they really were. Their vagueness in estimat- ing the divisions of time must be allowed for. They had never been used to measure time so accurately or so minutely as we do. They had no division shorter than the hour ; and they talked of the hours very loosely, making use chiefly of the prominent divisions—first, third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth hours. The third hour meant little more than ‘during the forenoon’; and if an ordi- nary person, speaking of the third hour, were criticised and told that he should have said the sixth hour, he would probably have regarded the correction as too slight to be worth making, just as a Turkish peasant would at the present day. Modern peoples are so habituated to minute and
* Cf. also Martial, viii. 67, x. 48; Juvenal, Sat, x. 215f. t Bilfinger, Der biirgerliche Tag.
NUMBERS, HOURS, AND YEARS
accurate divisions of time, and to precise punctu- ality, that their thought and language have ac- quired a precision which is wanting in the ancient writers,* and which we must not try to force on them by strained interpretation.
An example of the double meaning of the term ‘hour’ isseen if Mt 20° be compared with Plutarch, Crass. 17. In the former passage ‘the eleventh hour’ is used metaphorically to indicate the last point of time, the last line and hour of the dial, before the allotted time, viz. the day, comes to an end, and the opportunity is lost for ever. In the latter passage ‘ the twelfth hour’ is used to convey the same proverbial sense, as being the last period, which ends when the sun sets. St. Matthew thinks of the moment when the shadow crosses the last dividing line ; Plutarch thinks of the interval that elapses between that moment and the sunset. The influence of Roman usage is here seen: dials and divisions of time seem to have been more familiar in the Roman time, and with greater familiarity came the use of hora to indicate the point of time when the shadow crosses the line.