This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Question 84. Why do they take the beginning of the
day from the midnight?
Solution. Is the reason that the commonweal had a
military constitution at the first? For many matters of
concern on military expeditions are managed by night. Or
did they make sunrising the beginning of business, and
the night the preparation for it? For men ought to come
prepared to action, and not to be in preparation when they
should be doing,—as Myso is reported to have said to
Chilo the Wise, when he was making a fan in winter. Or
as the noontide to many is the time for finishing public
and weighty affairs, so did it seem meet to make midnight
the beginning? This hath this confirmation, that a Roman
governor would make no league or confederation in the
afternoon. Or is it impossible to take the beginning and
end of the day from sunrising to sunsetting? For, as the
vulgar measure the beginning of the day by sense to be
the first appearance of the sun, and take the first beginning
of the night to be the complete withdrawment of the sun
from sight, we shall thus have no equinoctial day; but the
night which we suppose comes nearest in equality to the
day will be manifestly shorter than the day by the diameter
[p. 250]
of the sun. Which absurdity the mathematicians, going
about to solve, have determined that, where the centre
of the sun toucheth the horizon, there is the true parting
point between day and night. But this contradicts sense;
for it must follow that whilst there is much light above the
earth, yea, the sun illuminating us, we will not for all this
confess it to be day, but must say that it is still night.
Whereas then it is hard to take the beginning of the day
from the rising and setting of the sun, by reason of the
forementioned absurdities, it remains to take the zenith and
the nadir for the beginning. The last is best, for the sun's
course from noon is by way of declination from us; but
from midnight he takes his course towards us, as sunrising
comes on.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 2.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.