238 
NOTES. 
comes of the ingenious explanations given by Plutarch 
in 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, tom. 7, page 446, 452, and 
484) ? These connexions between the ceremonies 
celebrated and the physical phenomena, this intimate 
relation between the s3nubol and the object, would then 
have taken place in the first year only of each sothic 
cycle. The very just observation made by Mr. Jomard 
on the passage of Achilles Tatius is applicable to all 
the stative festivals. That of Isis, mentioned by Ge- 
minus and Plutarch, was a lugubrious festival ; and if 
it was not conceptivef it sometimes took place at pe- 
riods when the da^’^s 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 3^ear (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 
