Rest Days; A Sociological Study 6i 



The nundinal period and nundinac present such close analogies 

 to the Jewish seven-day week and the Sabbath that it becomes 

 scarcely surprising to find the Roman institution contributing to 

 the development of the Christian Sunday. The earliest Sunday 

 law is the famous constitution of Constantine (321 A.D.) enact- 

 ing that all courts of justice, inhabitants of towns, and work- 

 shops were to be at rest on Sunday (venerabili die Solis). 

 Markets continued to be held on Sunday and indispensable agri- 

 cultural work was to be permitted, " since it so frequently hap- 

 pens that no other day is so appropriate for the sowing of grain 

 or the planting of vines."'* It is highly doubtful whether this 

 legislation of Constantine had any relation to Christianity ; at any 

 rate, as was acknowledged by a candid historian, the rescript 

 commanding the observance of Sunday contains no allusion to its 

 peculiar sanctity as a Christian institution.'^^ It would rather 

 appear that the emperor were only adding the day of the sun, 

 the worship of which was then firmly established in the empire, 

 to the other ferial days of the Roman calendar.'*^ With the 

 final victory of Christianity over paganism the old fcriae and the 

 mindinae were abolished,"' Sunday, together with the Christian 

 festivals, being gradually substituted in their place. 



ally, see Besnier, in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites 

 grecques et romaines, vii. 120-22; Marindin, in Smith, Wayte, and 

 Marindin, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities,^ ii. 251 sq. 



'* Codex Justinianus, bk. iii., tit. 12 {De Feriis) . 



"^ H. H. Milman, History of Christianity, New York, 1870, ii. 296. 



'*To the spread of Oriental solar worship in the empire from the second 

 to the fourth century must be also attributed the substitution of dies solis 

 for dies Saturni as the first day of the planetary week. Cf. Gundermann, 

 in Zeitschrift fur deutsche Wortforschung, 1901, i. 180 sq.) . 



"^The date of the obsolescence of the nundinae is not definitely known; 

 the calendar of Philocalus (354 A. D.) indicates that they were then still 

 observed at Rome. The days of the planetary week are marked by the 

 letters A-G, which side by side have the old nundinal letters A-H. This 

 had probably become a feature of the State calendar since the Sunday 

 legislation of Constantine (Carleton, in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Reli- 

 gion and Etiiics, iii. 84). 



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