When hora prima or secunda indicates a point of time, it means the moment when the shadow reaches the line at the end of the first or of the second hour after sunrise; and soon. Hence, in this usage, hora prima corresponds in logical sense, though not in time, to our expression ‘ one o'clock.’
The length of the hour varied, therefore, accord- ing to the length of the day: it was about 75 minutes long at midsummer, and hardly more than 45 at midwinter, while at the equinox it was exactly 60 minutes, like the hour in our modern custom. This sense of the word ‘hour’ as a period of time is found in such passages as Ac 19% 57,+ Lk 22°, Mt 20” 26%, Mk 14°”. In popular language the varying length of the hour is alluded to in such expressions as hora estiva. In both Greek and Roman times the conception of an hour as an unvarying period of time, the twenty-fourth part of the civil or legal Day, occasionally appears in books of a more scientific character, but never in popular literature or common life.
The division of the hour into 60 minutes is said to be of Babylonian origin, and may have had an existence in scientific thought and astronomical calculations; but such a minute division played no part in popular life, never affected popular thought, and was not expressed by any word in popular language. The hour was the shortest division of time known to ordinary people, as has been stated above.
In ordinary usage the night was divided, not into hours but into four watches, the second of which ended at midnight. The dial gave no means of dividing the night into hours ; and the length of hours of the day could not, except with much trouble and careful adjustment (such as only men of science would be able to give), be applied to the night by such methods of measuring as the clep- sydra or water-clock, because the night hours grew shorter as the day hours grew longer, and co- incided with them in length only at the equinox. But, by analogy from the expression hora sexta for ‘noon,’ midnight was often called hora sexta noctis (Ulpian in Digest. xli. 3.7 ; compare sale tlh Ue xxvii. 1. 5; Aulus Gellius, iii. 2. 11). The Greek corresponding expression is not found in the NT (probably not anywhere in strictly Greek litera-
* The looseness shown by St. Luke in regard to time is noted in St. Paul the Traveller, p. 18, etc. :
+ In Ac 57 dpay rpidy diaornuo must mean ‘the period of three hours’; it can hardly be, according to the usage described in the following paragraph, the interval that separates a line on the dial from the third following line, because that would give a space of only two hours, according to the ancient way of counting the starting-point as the first. Lk 2259 must be inter- preted on the same analogy.
Ll ——————— EE aaa
NUMBERS, HOURS, AND YEARS 477
ture), but the similar expression ‘at the third hour of night,’ implying the end of the first watch, occurs in Ac 23%,* In Ac 16% ‘the same hour of the night,’ the meaning is ‘instant’ or ‘ point of time,’ as in the expressions described above.
It is accordingly involved in the very idea and origin of the hours in common usage that they begin from sunrise, and that the first hour ended when the shadow reached the first dividing line on the dial; and so on. These hours are parts of the
natural day, the Lichttag, and cannot be counted
except as beginning with the day. The hours, as parts of the civil Day, were a totally different con- ception, which, as we have seen, never affected or entered into popular usage and popular thought. Is it possible that those equinoctial hours might have been counted as beginning from the point when the Day was considered to begin (though only in scientific work)? We ask, then, when the Day was considered as beginning. :
The legal or civil Day, comprising a complete period of day and night, was regarded as begin- ning from various points in the East and in the West. The Roman usage was the same as our modern usage: the Day was reckoned as the period from one midnight, hora sexta noctis, to the next. In the Jewish and the Greek usage the Day was reckoned from sunset to sunset ; and it is in accordance with its Eastern origin and its early development amid Greek surroundings that the Church always reckoned the ecclesiastical Day as beginning at sunset. Bilfinger, indeed, maintains that both Greeks and Romans (except in matters of Roman law) counted the Day as beginning at daylight, either sunrise or roughly at dawn ; but Unger has conclusively refuted his arguments on this point (see his article on ‘Tagesanfang’ in Philologus, 1892, pp. 14 1f., 212ff.), allowing only that there was a Macedonian usage (traceable at Pergamos and other places where the Macedonian calendar was used), according to which the Day was counted to begin from sunrise. It may, how- ever, be doubted whether those seeming cases of counting the Day from sunrise may not have been simply caused by the ordinary popular custom of counting the hours of the day as beginning with the light. But however that may be, it is certain that no example has ever been quoted from the ancient writers in which the hours were counted as beginning from midnight. Though the Roman legal Day began at midnight, yet the hours of the day were counted only as beginning from sunrise ; and the hours of the night (in the rare cases in which hours of the night were spoken of) only from sunset. In popular usage probably no night- hours were spoken of except the third, sixth, and perhaps the ninth, as the beginnings of the second, third, and fourth watches ; and those expressions were used, not because there was any device in ordinary use for dividing the night into twelve hours, but simply by analogy from the three main customary divisions of the day.