Etiology time, and often lacked fresh fruit and vegetables. Without knowing the precise cause, Captain James Cook suspected scurvy was caused by the lack of vegetables in the diet. Based on his suspicion, he forced his crew to eat sauerkraut, a cabbage preparation, every day, and based upon the positive outcomes, he inferred that it prevented scurvy, even though he did not know precisely why. It took about another two hundred years to discover the precise etiology: the lack of vitamin C in a sailor's diet. An etiological myth, or origin myth, is a myth intended to explain the origins of
Names of the days of the week nundinal cycle with the seven-day week. Our earliest evidence for this new system is a Pompeiian graffito referring to the 6th February ("viii idus Februarius") of the year AD 60 as "dies solis" ("Sunday"). Another early witness is a reference to a lost treatise by Plutarch, written in about AD 100, which addressed the question of "Why are the days named after the planets reckoned in a different order from the actual order?". The days were named after the planets of Hellenistic astrology, in the order Sun, Moon, Mars ("Ares"), Mercury ("Hermes"), Jupiter ("Zeus"), Venus ("Aphrodite") and Saturn ("Cronos"). The