Aretius himself lived to publish his principal work, "Problems of Theology", in 1573, and died the year following.
Kitten Week continues at Today's Date in Apocalypse History with this picture of a plump one with a strange gait:
Post-Script: A conversation in the facebook comments, about the apocalyptic meaning of the number 1260, led to this pedantic (but informative!) blurt --
Daniel 12 says that "A time, times, and half a time" - also 1290 days, it says - and 1335 days - indeed, it says that all three of these lengths of time - are the length of time that will elapse after the "Abomination of Desolation" is set up in the temple in Jerusalem. Thereupon a whole series of apocalyptic things happens, including the coming of the son of man (a phrase eagerly attached to Jesus by early Christians to connect him with Hebrew prophecies).
Great. But what in the world does any of that mean?
Back up. The Book of Daniel purports to have been written while Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian Empire had conquered Israel (beginning 582 BCE). Actually the book was written a couple hundred years later, after the Babylonians had been conquered by the Persians and the Persians had been conquered by Alexander the Great. Why the anachronistic misdirection? You might compare it to the way American slaves used the Exodus story to speak in code about their struggle for freedom. Similarly, while the Jews were oppressed by the Greek kings Alexander left behind, they projected their stories backward onto an earlier oppressor in order to be discreet and spare their skins. (We see the same thing in Revelation, where John keeps talking about Babylon whenever he means the Roman Empire. John borrows a lot more than that from Daniel, too, but it's another story.)
Anyway, the bad thing those Greek kings after Alexander were doing, was forcibly Hellenizing Jews in Jerusalem, requiring breaking of dietary laws, sabbath work, and so on. Worst of all, they put up a statue of Zeus in the Temple - and this is the thing referred to in veiled language in Daniel as "the Abomination of Desolation" (you know, like, an abomination that causes God to desolate or abandon us). So: the apocalyptic prediction in Daniel is that after this Hellenic defilement of the temple, the end was going to be coming in - "a time, times, and half a time", which most interpreters agree was a weird way of saying three and a half years. (It's from here that you get the commonplace that the reign of the Antichrist on Earth will last three and a half years.)
Now if you reckon three and a half years by the solar calendar, you can arrive at 1290 days; if by adding it up as 42 months, 1335 days. Why Daniel wants to pass on that 45-day discrepancy to us, by calling out these durations separately, is hard to know. Some early Christian commentators called the difference between the two "the refreshment of the saints", a kind of a mid-apocalypse respite where the resurrected faithful get to enjoy a nice time on the Earth again. But in any case, the numbers 1290 and 1335, whether counted as years or as days, have given date-setting apocalypse hounds plenty to work with in pointing to any square on the calendar that they like.
