238 NOTES. 



comes of the ingenious explanations given by Plutarch 

 m his treatise de Iside et Osiride, of the motives for 

 which the Egyptians celebrated such a festival in the 

 spring, and another at the summer solstice (Plut. 

 Opera omnia, ed. Reiske, torn. 7, page 446, 452, and 

 484) ? These connexions between the ceremonies 

 celebrated and the physical phenomena, this intimate 

 relation between the symbol and the object, would then 

 have taken place in the first } r ear only of each sothic 

 cycle. The very just observation made by Mr. Jomard 

 on the passage of Achilles Tatius is applicable to all 

 the stat he festivals. That of Isis, mentioned by Ge- 

 minus and Plutarch, was a lugubrious festival ; and if 

 it was not conceptive, it sometimes took place at pe- 

 riods when the days had been for a long time on the in- 

 crease (Uranol., page 19, nota 35). Does not the 

 oath, which the priests imposed on the king for the 

 preservation of the vague year (Comment, in Ger- 

 man, interpret. Arati, sign. Capricorni ; Hygin., ed. 

 Basil., 1535, p. 174), betray the craft of a privileged 

 order, which, for the sake of rendering itself necessary 

 to the people, and keeping up its authority, arrogates 

 to itself the right of announcing the festivals con- 

 nected with astronomical phenomena ? 



Plutarch, living under the reign of Trajan, already 

 made use of the fixed year of the Alexandrians, ac- 

 cording to which, the first of Thoth corresponds to the 

 29th of August of the Julian calendar (Ideler, Hist. 

 Unt. pag. 127); and he refers the names of the months 

 and the festivals to the immutable epochas of the 

 solstices and the equinoxes. Achilles Tatius, a Chris- 

 tian, and probably a bishop, lived several ages after 

 Plutarch : it is therefore needless to admit, with de 

 la Nauze, the existence of a fixed year under the 



