Was Julius Caesar murdered in 44 BC or 44 BCE? Did Nero commit suicide in AD 68 or 68 CE? Anno Domini or the so-called “Common Era”?
I have a bizarre interest, engendered back in my student days, in ancient history, so find myself reading books about people like Caesar and Nero more perhaps than others, who sensibly prefer to concentrate on the manifold concerns of the modern world. As a result of this, I get irritated by what seems to be a relatively recent change from good old-style Anno Domini to the “Common Era”. It can get a bit confusing as CE and BCE look too similar on the page - I’m sure I came across an example of an author (and his proof readers) getting it wrong, but I now can’t remember where it was.
Maybe I should pull myself together and get over it. But, on reflection, I’m not so sure. When you think about it, it seems to be a symptom - admittedly a very minor one - of the kinds of “virtue signalling” that in other contexts are doing so much damage.
Origins
Where did it all start? And who is behind it? Is it part of what makes us wish each other “Seasons Greetings” rather than “Happy Christmas”? Is it even part of the same pressures that are requiring our children to be taught that western advances in science were shameful examples of white hegemony?
Actually, the origins go back a surprisingly long time. (The origins of the AD/BC dating system go back, unsurprisingly, to medieval Christianity. Apparently the system was devised in AD 525 by a monk with the delightful name of Dionysius Exiguus - “tiny Dionysius”, presumably.)
The CE change goes back to the early 17th century. Johannes Kepler, the great man who worked out that the Earth goes round the sun and not the other way round, called it the Anno Vulgaris Aerae, the “Vulgar Era”. Sadly, that never caught on - it might have killed it all at birth. (“How vulgar, my dear!”)
I suppose it gives some clue as to what it’s meant to mean - the dating system then “commonly” used. To be sure, the Era starting in AD 1 hasn’t been “common” in any obvious sense - certainly not religious, in that Judaism was already in place long before and Islam hadn’t been invented.
Jewish academics started it all, not being keen on references to “Our Lord” even in Latin. To his great credit, the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (the grandfather of Felix, the composer) thought it a bad idea as it would hinder the integration of Jews into German society.
What about now?
But now? What is behind it? It has all the signs of being part of the way in which people are hesitant about defending our culture.
The list of examples would be too long (and boring) to attempt. But a recent one does stand out. The president of the Royal Society of Literature has decided that the RSL must become less “formidably elitist”, forgetting presumably that its role is to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent” - an elitist objective if ever there was one. They purport to be concerned about 200 years of injustice. Both V S Naipaul (in 1962) and Ben Okri (somewhat later) managed to overcome the injustice we are meant to be ashamed of.
This is what irritates me about the essentially trivial issue of how we refer to dates.
It is becoming more and more important to defend our culture. We are welcoming hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many or possibly most of whom have no knowledge of our culture but are prepared to risk their lives to come here. They don’t want to hear how awful we are. But they desperately need to integrate into our society and to understand why we are the country that so many people want to live in - and, frankly, why some of our habits and customs reflect the influence of Christianity, which has been part of our culture for about 1,500 years.
So, let’s have no more of the “Common Era”. I’m delighted to see that Tom Holland in his recent book Pax is an AD/BC man, as is Simon Sebag Montefiore in his The World: A Family History of Humanity. So maybe we can relax.
Tony Herbert
11 January AD 2025
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