er after overlapping,
so to say, throughout the whole of the interval. Thus, for example, it is
only once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the
longest or shortest day; and as this coincidence can be observed with the
aid of a simple dial, the observation is naturally one of the first to
furnish a base for a calendar which shall bring lunar and solar times into
tolerable, though not exact, harmony.(164) But in early days the proper
adjustment of the calendar is a matter of religious concern, since on it
depends a knowledge of the right seasons for propitiating the deities
whose favour is indispensable to the welfare of the community.(165) No
wonder, therefore, that the king, as the chief priest of the state, or as
himself a god, should be liable to deposition or death at the end of an
astronomical period. When the great luminaries had run their course on
high, and were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be thought
that the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them unabated,
under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor. In southern
India, as we have seen, the king's reign and life terminated with the
revolution of the planet Jupiter round the sun. In Greece, on the other
hand, the king's fate seems to have hung in the balance at the end of
every eight years, ready to fly up and kick the beam as soon as the
opposite scale was loaded with a falling star.

(M51) The same train of thought may explain an ancient Greek custom which
appears to have required that a homicide should be banished his country,
and do penance for a period of eight or nine years.(166) With the
beginning of a new cycle or great year, as it was called, it might be
thought that all nature was regenerate, all old scores wiped out.
According to Pindar, the dead whose guilt had been purged away by an abode
of eight years in the nether world were born again on earth in the ninth
year as glorious kings, athletes, and sages.(167) The doctrine may well be
an old popular belief rather than a mere poet