Dionysius The Small
Denis the Little, or Dionysius Exiguus (about 470 - about 540 ) is a monk known to have calculated the Anno Domini or vulgar era , used as AD by the Gregorian calendar. He won himself the nickname Exiguus ("Little") as a sign of intellectual humility.
Summary |
Dionysius the Little, was born in the Roman province of Scythia Minor (corresponding to the current Dobrogea region of north-eastern Bulgaria and eastern Romania , located between the Danube and Black Sea ) and would be of Ancestry Armenian (though his friend and disciple Cassiodorus said of him in his De divinis Lectionibus, he was born c. xxiii Scythian ). It was part of the community of monks Scythian concentrated to Tomis (now Constanta ).
He comes to Rome to 500 , is made abbot of a monastery , acquired a great reputation by his writings on church discipline and chronology , and died in 540.
It has collections of her Apostolic Canons (published for the 1st time in 1628 , in-8, by Justel ) of Decretals (in the Library of canon law); Revision Latin works Pachomius and other Fathers Church.
It was commissioned by the papal chancellor Bonofatius devise a method for determining the date of Easter according to the "Rule Alexandrian" as enacted in the Council of Nicaea I. :
- Easter is the Sunday following the fourteenth day of the moon reaches that age of 21 March or immediately thereafter.
At that time it was customary to count the years by using the beginning of the reign of Emperor Diocletian , known for having started the last persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire.
In the year 525 AD Dionysius Exiguus introduced by using it in his Easter table. In this way he established the use of counting the years from the Incarnation (March 25) and birth (25 December) of Jesus Christ , which he placed in the year 753 of Rome (ie ie the current calendar year -1). Historical studies - including that of the reign of Herod the Great - show that he committed an error of at least four years. Denys confirmed the periodicity of 532 years for the return of Easter on the same day of that month, he did start to the year of the incarnation. This period of 532 years is the product of 19 years ( Metonic cycle ) by 4 (to account for leap years) and 7 (for the days of the week before Easter must fall on a Sunday) which was already known to Christians Alexandria, but is called for, by name of Dionysius, Dionysian period.
Note that it is at the Petit Denis we must choose a calendar without a year zero , which sometimes causes some complications.
The presence of the Latin word nulla, which means no in the third column of the table gives the impression that Easter Dionysius Exiguus knew the concept of zero. However, nothing can be deduced that the nulla was a true zero, and in any case it has not used in its calculations. We had to wait for the second millennium before we could have the number zero.
Posterity: the calculation of time
During the Carolingian period , it seems that we still had the habit of counting the years from the beginning of the reign of the emperor ( Charlemagne and his successors).
The monk, the Venerable Bede , the eighth century , developed the science of computing time, which is named computation (from latin computar, calculating).
The purpose of counting the years from the birth of Jesus Christ only began to spread that around the year one thousand.
The Gregorian calendar began to replace the Julian calendar in 1582.
Today, the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation Works The texts of Dionysius the Little has been published in Volume 67 of the Latin Patrologia of Migne See also
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