Read Online The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan - Free Book Online

well as the traditional names of the months, though later the Senate changed Quintilius to Julius (July) in his honour.
     
    When the new day dawned on 1 January, 45 BC--the kalends of Januarius, 709 AUC--Romans awoke with a new calendar that was then among the most accurate in the world. Even so, it remained subject to errors and tinkering by priests and politicians. The first mistake was to come soon after Caesar’s death in 44 BC, when the college of pontiffs began counting leap years every three years instead of four. This quickly threw the calendar off again, though the error was easily corrected later by Emperor Augustus. Catching the mistake in 8 BC, he ordered the next three leap years to be skipped, restoring the calendar to its proper time by the year AD 8. Since that year this calendar has never missed a leap year--with the exception of those century leap years eliminated by Pope Gregory XIII in his calendar reform of 1582. But Augustus and his handpicked Senate did not stop with this sensible and necessary calendar fix. They also tampered with the length of the months, with results far less satisfactory.
    This Augustan ‘reform’ began when the Senate decided to honour this emperor by renaming the month of Sextilis as Augustus. Part of the resolution passed by the Senate has been preserved:
    ‘Whereas the Emperor Augustus Caesar, in the month of Sextilis, was first admitted to the consulate, and thrice entered the city in triumph, and in the same month the legions, from the Janiculum, placed themselves under his auspices, and in the same month Egypt was brought under the authority of the Roman people, and in the same month an end was put to the civil wars; and whereas for these reasons the said month is, and has been, most fortunate to this empire, it is hereby decreed by the senate that the said month shall be called Augustus.’
    This simple name change would have been fine. But either out of vanity or because his supporters demanded it, the Senate decided that Augustus’s new month, with only 30 days, should not have fewer days than the month honouring Julius Caesar, with 31 days. So a day was snatched from February, leaving it with only 28 days--29 in a leap year. To avoid having three months in a row with 31 days, Augustus and his supporters switched the lengths of September, October, November and December. This wrecked Caesar’s convenient system of alternating 30-and 31-day months, leaving us with that annoying old English ditty that seems to have originated in the sixteenth century, though it must have had precedents far more ancient:
    Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November,
February has twenty-eight alone
All the rest have thirty-one.
Excepting leap year--that’s the time
When February’s days are twenty-nine.
    Later Roman emperors would also try naming months after themselves. Nero, for instance, renamed April Neronius to commemorate his escape from an attempted assassination in that month during AD 65. Other month changes that failed to stick included substituting Claudius for May and Germanicus for June. When the Senate tried to change September to Tiberius, this taciturn emperor vetoed the measure, coyly asking: ‘What will you do when there are thirteen Caesars?’ In the provinces local leaders and subject kings frequently changed their months to flatter powerful figures of the moment. In Cyprus the calendar once had months named for Augustus; his nephew Agrippa; his wife, Livia; his half-sister, Octavia; his stepsons, Nero and Drusus; and even Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome from whom Julius Caesar, Augustus and the entire Julian brood claimed to be descended.
     
    The second error in Caesar’s calendar was less easy to repair than the mix up over whether a leap year came every third or fourth year. This was the conundrum noticed by the Alexandrian astronomers Hipparchus and Ptolemy and later by Roger Bacon and others in the Middle Ages--that Caesar’s year of 365 days