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  • Time and the Romans
  • Denis Feeney (bio)

Every day we are living within a Roman time machine, in the form of our calendar. The names of ten of our months go back to the time when Rome was still ruled by kings, over 2,500 years ago. By the time the kings were expelled and the republic was founded, traditionally in 509 B.C.E., the year was already beginning in January, as it still does, despite the fact that a vestige of an earlier scheme survives, with the ninth month being called the "seventh" (September), the tenth the "eighth" (October), the eleventh the "ninth" (November), and the twelfth the "tenth" (December). The features of the modern calendar with which we are all familiar—the extra day added every leap year, the lengths of the months, varying from 28 or 29 to 30 or 31 days—were brought into being at midnight on the last day of 46 B.C.E., as Julius Caesar abolished the old republican calendar and replaced it with a new calendar, which for the first time in human history accurately tracked the Earth's annual relationship with the sun. After his assassination in 44 B.C.E., the fifth month ("Quintilis"), in which he had been born, was renamed "Julius" in his honor. In 8 B.C.E. his son Augustus renamed the sixth month ("Sextilis") in his own honor, leaving us with the sequence of month names we still use. Pope Gregory XIII made a slight adjustment in 1582 (adopted by Britain and its North American colonies in 1752) to allow for the fact that the average length of the Julian year was eleven minutes and twelve seconds too long. Dropping ten days in 1582 and eleven days in 1752 brought the calendar back into close harmony with the sun; ensuring that centennial years in future would be leap years only if divisible by 400 (i.e., 1600 and 2000 but not 1700, 1800, or 1900) saves three days every 400 years and means that the recalibrated time machine of Julius Caesar will need no further tinkering until the year 4000, when our descendants will have to worry about whether that should be a leap year or not.

The very fact that our experience of annual time is so intimately indebted to this long vanished culture can make it very hard for us to come to terms with the ways in which the Roman experience of time was radically different from ours. The issues are very clear when we consider the republican, pre-Julian calendar. Whoever designed this calendar had the aim of averaging 365 days per year over a four-year period by adding days to the month of February every two years, but the priests responsible for the calendar did not keep to this goal, especially in times of military crisis and civil strife, of which there were plenty in the middle and late republic. It was actually of no practical consequence that the republican calendar did not keep track of the natural year. In use, the calendar was a device for regulating ritual and civil affairs so that Roman citizens could organize their religious, political, legal, and business activities. The fact that the calendar did not necessarily track the natural year in more than a rough and ready fashion did not make it unfit for these purposes. Nor did it detract from the calendar's symbolic power as a religious instrument or from its immense social significance as a device used by kings and then aristocrats and priests to stage the community's identity as a civic unit, with its commemoration of festivals and ordering of days fit and unfit for public business.


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From Frank J. Scott, Portraitures of Julius Caesar (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903).

This can be a hard issue for us to grasp, since our modern assumptions about what calendars are for are profoundly conditioned by our upbringing within the reformed Julian calendar. As a result of this familiarity with Caesar's revolutionary calendar we take it for granted that a calendar is there precisely to measure time, to create an...

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