The Calendar

At the commencement of September, the Astrae were burned to the flames, and the statues of Roman deities destroyed, to be collected in the winter months for the libations of wine to be offered by the plebs to the annual "disciplines" at Vesta's tomb. The sacrifices carried out, and the spices thus consecrated, the Latin calendar then put in order, and the new year celebrated.

This was the calendar of the southern provinces, or Rome, as they came to be called. Its meaning was the same, but, by the time of Varro (1st century BC), its connection with the ancient Greek period had become confused, and the year in the book called the Lex Calixtina was used instead of the calendar proper. This must be placed in its correct historical period, as it was the name given to a literary treatise by Varro, and when this was written he was not referring to the system of Livy.

The dating of certain elements of the old Italic calendar is uncertain. The earliest dates of Varro are not certain either; but it is known that Augustus celebrated the eighteenth day of April as the anniversary of his usurpation of power, and the twenty-fifth day of February as the anniversary of the triumph of the province of Germania Inferior, which occurred in honour of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

The distinction between the months is considered by many writers to have been originally artificial, and probably having its origin in the need to fix the length of each month with reference to certain natural phenomena, like the diurnal movement of the Sun. It is true that some commentators of antiquity hold that the months were originally of different lengths, the various months corresponding to certain divisions of the sun, either the Northern, as Varro says, or to the Southern. The division of the months into two groups, from the point of view of the ancient grammarians and Romans, which probably corresponds to the months of the modern Roman calendar, was not, however, a purely geographical, nor even a purely numerical, arrangement; it appears to have been accompanied by an official character, and was adopted with the Senate's concurrence, but on purely ceremonial grounds.

It must be borne in mind that the study of natural phenomena, such as the lunar cycle, was not held in the highest favour in the later period, at least among the Grecians, who never incorporated the lunar cycle into their calendar, preferring to believe in an immanence of the elements, the local climate, and the phases of the moon in their decision on the selection of the year's auspices. The explanation advanced by those writers, that the month was originally divided into three equal parts, with thirty days in each, is not in itself sufficient to account for the difference of length; for each of these divisions is assumed to have taken place on the basis of the movements of the earth, and in order to determine their times it was necessary to consider the phases of the moon; but the lunar phases which formerly took place on fixed intervals, and which, from the old age of the lunar tables, were an easy enough work of divination, were not found by Varro to be very useful, as it appears from the fact that at the time of Varro their three parts were much less uniform in their length than they are today; for they differed from one another by about twenty-four hours in about four months. It must be remarked, however, that this was not considered any inconvenience by the Romans, and not a single voice has been heard in the debate to advocate any change in the system of Varro, since he was dead, and not even among the republicans, who, according to an expression attributed to Cicero, were of an opinion that they might change the months only when they needed them to bring about the birth of a child, have they ever proposed an alteration of the system.

The change of the calendar we are now considering was instituted by Augustus on the date of the fourteenth year of his reign, 28 BC. The months which had already been established by Augustus were maintained, but those which had been added to them by him were numbered and named after him; the existing month was designated by the month of his birth, in which his grandfather Caesar Julius Solinus, or Sextus Julius Aquila, and his father Marcus Claudius Marcellus were born. The reformed version of the calendar was made uniform throughout the Empire by Augustus's standard measure. It consisted of 12 imperial measure-tables, each one of them having a number of inches corresponding to each day of the month, and with their portions arranged by the same ratio as the months. The numerals, as they are preserved in all our copies of the Imperial Roman Calendar, were added to the number of the month for the next day, and when the month was over, these new numbers were deleted, and the new months added in the order of the imperial measure, being divided, as the months always were, into thirty days each.

The reform of the calendar has generally been attributed to one Gaius Gellius Publicola, who was praetor in 78 AD. In that year, as Julianus, son of Caracalla, and emperor at Constantinople, was in the provinces campaigning, Gellius, whose duties included supervising public security, directed all the schools and schools of letters in the provinces to arrange the emblems of the months according to the same order as the months of the old calendar. This had the effect of fixing the first month on 1 January, and of fixing the five intercalary months on Sundays. A few days later he commenced making preparations for introducing the new calendar, and applied to Augustus for leave to proceed. In the year 89, Gellius appeared before the Senate, having, as he said, created two new measures of the month. He was again appointed praetor in 92, but this time he was unable to take the field, owing to illness. He never stood in court again, and his name, or at least the name of Gellius, does not appear again in the history of the Roman civil service. We are still more fortunate in the relation of his son, Gaius, to the reform of the calendar, who actually proposed it, and was soon to leave public life to devote himself to agriculture. The desire of most magistrates, whether praetor or senator, when they retire from the life of politics, to change their surroundings, either by starting upon a business of their own, or by moving into a region remote from the cities, to be replaced by new visitors from Rome, obliges them, after their retirement, to stay in the country. This has been an advantage to agriculture, as the construction of towns and palaces is somewhat neglected, because the necessary labor is at first much more expensive, and so a change of residence at an early stage is useful to the farmer, who is then not so backward in technology as he would have been in his own place.