When the duration of the fast became generally fixed at forty days, a reason for this was not far to seek—the length of the fast of Jesus. From the beginning, however, a difference became apparent, according as Holy Week was either included in Lent or regarded as something distinct in itself. The ante-Nicene practice afforded a precedent for this. The latter practice is adopted in particular in the Apostolic Constitutions, and prevailed in a great part of the East. But in the East, Saturday was exempt from fasting, and so the number of fast days was, as a matter of fact, not greater than in the West, where the other practice obtained. Later, it was expressly set forth that Lent should be a _quadragesima_, not a _quinquagesima_, as by the first and fourth councils of Orleans in the sixth century.[206] In some quarters, our informant unfortunately does not say where, Thursday was also exempted from fasting.[207] Originally, it appears, the fast of forty days, _quadragesima_, was taken to mean the days before Easter as a whole, Sundays included. This gave for a period of six weeks only thirty-six fasting days, and, where Saturday was not kept as a fast day, only thirty. To rectify this, the number of fast days was increased actually to forty, with the result that in the West, the beginning of Lent (_caput jejunii_) was put back four days; but in the East, where only five days in each week were fasted, it was put back further still. In the West, especially in Rome, this alteration, by which the fast began on the Wednesday before the sixth Sunday before Easter, had not yet been accomplished by the time of Gregory the Great. In the East, too, the tendency to make up the full number of fast days to forty was apparent also at an early date. There, owing to Saturday not being a fast day, the beginning of Lent had to be thrown further back than in the West, and Lent began eight weeks before Easter, and since the Saturdays, Holy Saturday excepted, were not fast days, extended actually over forty-one days instead of forty. Abstinence from flesh meat began on the Monday after the eighth Sunday before Easter, corresponding to the Latin _dominica sexagesima_, which is called the Sunday of Abstinence from Flesh Meat (κυριακὴ ἀπόκρεως). From the following Sunday, called the Sunday for Eating Cheese (κυριακὴ τοῦ τυροφάγου), _lacticinia_ are forbidden. The following Sundays are reckoned as merely the first to the fifth Sundays in Lent, and only the first of them has the additional designation of Orthodox Sunday, in commemoration of the settlement of the Iconoclastic controversy. Later on, the Easterns attached great importance to the question whether Saturday ought or ought not to be kept as a fast day. As early, indeed, as the Apostolic Canons, it is expressly forbidden to fast on Saturday under threat of ecclesiastical penalties.[208] At a later date this difference became one of the points of dispute between the Greeks and Latins.