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History of the calendarThe original Roman calendar is believed to have been a lunar calendar, which may have been based on one of the Greek lunar calendars. Roman tradition claimed that it was invented by Romulus, the founder of Rome about 753 BC. The earliest known version contained ten months, and started at the vernal equinox; however, the months by this time were no longer 'lunar':
The first reform of the calendar was attributed to Numa Pompilius, the second of the seven traditional Kings of Rome. He is said to have reduced the 30-day months to 29 days and to have added January (29 days) and February (28 days) to the end of the calendar around 713 BC, and thus brought the length of the calendar year up to 355 days:
Note that the later months are named based on their position in the original calendar — October comes from the prefix oct, meaning 'eight' (think octagon). These names have been retained even though October is the 10th month of the modern calendar. Quintilis and Sextilis were later renamed July and August in honor of the Roman emperors Julius and Augustus Caesar.[1] In order to keep the calendar year roughly aligned with the solar year, a leap month of 27 days, the Mensis Intercalaris, sometimes also known as Mercedonius or Mercedinus, was added from time to time at the end of February, which was shortened to 23 or 24 days. The resulting year was either 377 or 378 days long. The decision to insert the intercalary month, and its placement, was the responsibility of the pontifex maximus. On average, this happened roughly in alternate years.
MonthsThe Romans had special names for three specific days in each month. The system appears to originally have been based on phases of the Moon (Luna), and these days were probably declared publicly when the lunar conditions were observed. After the reforms of Numa Pompilius, they occurred on fixed days. The named days were:
Months with Nones on the 5th and Ides on the 13th days: January, February, April, June, August, September, November, December. Months with Nones on the 7th and Ides on the 15th days: March, May, July, October. These rules are summarised in the following mnemonic:
Other days in the month were normally unnamed, though some were sometimes known by the name of a festival that occurred on them (e.g. Feralia, Quirinalia). Days other than the Kalends, Nones and Ides were identified by counting down to the named days (sometimes to festival days), in a way that is quite different from the modern Western calendar. The Romans did not count the days of the month retrospectively, looking back to the first of the month (that is: 1st, 2nd day since the start of the month, 3rd day since the start of the month). They counted forward to their named days. Also, to the distress of moderns trying to work out dates in Roman calendar documents, they counted inclusively, so that 2 September is considered 4 days before 5 September, rather than 3 days before. The following example spells out how days were named for the pre-Julian September, which had only 29 days. It shows the Roman form of the date, the translation, and how we would say it today. The Romans used abbreviations: "a.d." = "ante diem" = "days before", "prid." = "pridie" = "the day before", "Kal" = "Kalends" etc.
Notice that by counting inclusively and by having a special name for the day before a named day the Roman calendar loses the possibility of saying: 2 days before a named day. Also, after the Ides, the date no longer mentions September, but is counting down towards October. When Julius Caesar added a day to September, he did not add it to the end of the month. Rather, the new day that got added was the day after the Ides:
As a result, the position of all the following dates in September got bumped up by one day. This has some unexpected effects. For example, the emperor Augustus was born on 23 September 63 BC. In the pre-Julian calendar this is 8 days before the Kalends of October (or, in Roman style, a.d. VIII Kal. Oct.), but in the Julian calendar it is 9 days (a.d. IX Kal. Oct.). Because of this ambiguity, in some parts of the Empire his birthday was celebrated on both dates, i.e. (for us) on both 23 and 24 September. Nundinal cycleThe Roman Republic, like the Etruscans, used a "market week" of eight days, marked as A to H in the calendar. A market was held on the eighth day. For the Romans, who counted inclusively, this was every ninth day, hence the market became called "nundinae", and the market cycle is known as the "nundinal cycle". Since the length of the year was not a multiple of 8 days, the letter for the market day (known as a "nundinal letter") changed every year. For example, if the letter for market days in some year was A and the year was 355 days long, then the letter for the next year would be F. The nundinal cycle formed a basic rhythm of day-to-day Roman life; the market day was the day that country people would come to the city, and the day that city people would buy their groceries for the next 8 days. For this reason, a law was passed in 287 BC (the Lex Hortensia) that forbade the holding of meetings of the comitia (for example to hold elections) on market days, but permitted the holding of legal actions. In the late republic, a superstition arose that it was unlucky to start the year with a market day (i.e. for the market day to fall on 1 January, with a letter A), and the pontiffs, who regulated the calendar, took steps to avoid it. Because the nundinal cycle was absolutely fixed at 8 days under the Republic, information about the dates of market days is one of the most important tools we have for working out the Julian equivalent of a Roman date in the pre-Julian calendar. In the early Empire, the Roman market day was occasionally changed. The details of this are not clear, but one likely explanation is that it would be moved by one day if it fell on the same day as the festival of Regifugium, an event that could occur every other Julian leap year. When this happened the market day would be moved to the next day, which was the bissextile (leap) day. The nundinal cycle was eventually replaced by the modern seven-day week, which first came into use in Italy during the early imperial period, after the Julian calendar had come into effect. The system of nundinal letters was also adapted for the week, see dominical letter. For a while, the week and the nundinal cycle coexisted, but by the time the week was officially adopted by Constantine in AD 321 the nundinal cycle had fallen out of use. For further information on the week, see week and days of the week. Character of the dayEach day of the Roman calendar was associated with a "character", which was marked in the fasti. The most important of these were dies fasti, marked by an F, on which legal matters could normally be heard, dies nefasti, marked by an N, on which they could not, and dies comitiales, marked by a C, on which meetings of the public assemblies known as comitia were permitted, subject to other constraints such as the Lex Hortensia. A few days had a different character, e.g. EN (endotercissus or perhaps endoitio exitio nefas), a day in which legal actions were permitted on half of the day only, and NP, which were public holidays. YearsIn the Roman Republic, the years were not counted. Instead they were named after the consuls who were in power at the beginning of the year (see List of Republican Roman Consuls). For example, 205 BC was The year of the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus and Publius Licinius Crassus. Lists of consuls were maintained in the fasti. Image:Kalender.jpg Fragment of an imperial-age consular fasti, Museo Epigrafico, Rome However, in the later Republic, historians and scholars began to count years from the founding of the city of Rome. Different scholars used different dates for this event. The date most widely used today is that calculated by Varro, 753 BC, but other systems varied by up to several decades. Dates given by this method are numbered ab urbe condita (meaning after the founding of the city, and abbreviated AUC). When reading ancient works using AUC dates, care must be taken to determine the epoch used by the author before translating the date into a Julian year. The first day of the consular term, which was effectively the first day of the year, changed several times during Roman history. It became 1 January in 153 BC. Before then it was 15 March. Earlier changes are a little less certain. There is good reason to believe it was 1 May for most of the third century BC, till 222 BC. Livy mentions consulates starting on 1 July before then, and arguments exist for other dates at earlier times. Converting pre-Julian datesThe fact that we use the same month names as the Romans encourages us to assume that a Roman date occurred on the same Julian date as its modern equivalent. This assumption is not correct. Even early Julian dates, before the leap year cycle was stabilised, are not quite what they appear to be. For example, it is well known that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC, and this is usually converted to 15 March 44 BC. While he was indeed assassinated on the 15th day of the Roman month Martius, the equivalent date on the modern Julian calendar is probably 14 March 44 BC. Finding the exact Julian equivalent of a pre-Julian date can be very hard. Since we have an essentially complete list of the consuls, it is not difficult to find the Julian year that generally corresponds to a pre-Julian year. However, our sources very rarely tell us which years were regular, which were intercalary, and how long an intercalary year was. Nevertheless, we do know that the pre-Julian calendar could be substantially out of alignment with the Julian calendar. Two precise astronomical synchronisms given by Livy show that in 168 BC the two calendars were misaligned by more than 2 months, and in 190 BC they were 4 months out of alignment. We have a number of other clues to help us reconstruct the Julian equivalent of pre-Julian dates. First, we know the precise Julian date for the start of the Julian calendar (although there is some uncertainty even about that), and we have detailed sources for the previous decade or so, mostly in the letters and speeches of Cicero. Combining these with what we know about how the calendar worked, especially the nundinal cycle, we can accurately convert Roman dates after 58 BC relative to the start of the Julian calendar. Also, the histories of Livy give us exact Roman dates for two eclipses in 190 BC and 168 BC, and we have a few loose synchronisms to dates in other calendars which help to give rough (and sometimes exact) solutions for the intervening period. Before 190 BC the alignment between the Roman and Julian years is determined by clues such as the dates of harvests mentioned in the sources. Combining these sources of data, we are able to estimate approximate Julian equivalents of Roman dates back to the start of the First Punic War in 264 BC. However, while we have enough data to make such reconstructions, the number of years before 45 BC for which we can convert pre-Julian Roman dates to Julian dates with certainty is very small, and several reconstructions of the pre-Julian calendar are possible. One detailed reconstruction giving conversions from pre-Julian dates into Julian dates is available at [1]. See alsoReferences and further reading
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