It’s another chilly and rainy day, with a high temperature predicted to be only 63°F, though it will rise to the eighties in a few days—summer’s last gasp. In this day in history, Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning (1846), John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (1953), Haile Selassie was deposed (1974), and the Greeks defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.; I’m not sure how they know the day of the year). And, in Dobrzyn, Hili shows a rare moment of empathy rather than her usual concern for her belly:
A: Hili…
Hili: Do not disturb. I’m dreaming about peace and I’m sending greetings to all nations of the world.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili…
Hili: Nie przeszkadzaj, śnię o pokoju i pozdrawiam wszystkie narody świata.
I love her sweet little paw!
Looks to me that her sweet little paws have been customising the finish on the couch.
I tend to question the ancient dates worked out to the corresponding day in the modern calendar. There are a lot of variables: the calendar used (different Greek cities used different calendars at that time I believe), whether the calendar was based on the moon or the sun (Egyptians used a solar calendar so if you can correspond and Ancient Greek even to an Egyptian one, you’re in luck) and then figuring all that out to our own calendar. Of course, you also have to accept the original Ancient account that placed the events on that day.
Even Wikipedia admits to a month of uncertainty in the date. (Multiple) sources give the Persians as having had a successful summer campaign ; the Spartan force couldn’t depart until after a particular festival had finished, but opinions on the date of that vary by up to a month. Then there are the entertainments of trying to correlate different city’s calendars.
The length of the day and month are also changing, relatively rapidly. The length of the year is probably changing too, but I don’t think that has been demonstrated from raw measurement. Yet.
Worse…at these types of time scales, you run into the constellations getting out of synch with the equinoxes. Even longer time scales and the constellations are unrecognizable and the number of seconds it takes the Earth to revolve about its axis and orbit the Sun both differ.
At some point, all the assumptions the calendar is based on break down. Any calendar is only going to make sense for a limited span of time.
I think the least-insane approach is to refer to dates according to the calendar in use at the time. For something like the Battle of Marathon…I’d say that it took place in the second month of Metageitnion, the second month of summer in the Attic calendar, and that September 12 is a good arbitrary date to pick to commemorate the events.
b&