Chapter 35. On the seasons.
1. There are four seasons of the year: spring, summer, autumn, winter. And they are called seasons (tempora) from tempering,[305] since they are tempered in turn by moisture, dryness, heat, and cold.
2. It is known that after the creation of the universe the seasons were divided into three months each, according to the quality of the sun’s course.... And the ancients make the following divisions of these seasons: in the first month spring is called novum, in the second, adultum, in the third, praeceps.[306]
7–8. These seasons are assigned also to separate parts of the heavens. The spring is given to the Orient, because then all things arise (oriuntur) from the earth; summer to the South, because its division is more intense in its heat; winter to the North, because it is torpid with colds and perpetual frost; autumn to the Occident, because it has serious diseases. Whence, too, the leaves of the trees fall. The bordering of cold and heat and the contending of opposite airs causes the autumn to abound in diseases.
Chapter 36. On years.
1. The year is the circle of the sun when it returns to the same place in relation to the stars, after three hundred and sixty-five days....
3. There are three kinds of years. For the year is the lunar, of thirty days, the solstitial, which contains twelve months, or the great year, when all the planets return to the same place, which happens after many solstitial years.
Chapter 38. On generations and ages.
5. Age (aetas) is used properly in two ways: for it is either the age of man, as infancy, prime, old age; or the age of the world, whose first age is from Adam to Noe; the second, from Noe to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the migration of Judah to Babylon; the fifth, from then to the coming of the Saviour in the flesh; the sixth, which is now in progress and which will continue until the world is ended.
6. Julius Africanus was the first of our [writers] to set forth in the style of simple history, in the time of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the passing of these ages by generations and reigns. Then Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the priest Hieronymus of holy memory, published a complex history of chronological tables, using reigns and dates at the same time.[307]