46 BCE

Julian calendar

• Julius Caesar
• established by edict
• the Julian calendar,
• reforming the Roman calendar
• in the year 46 BCE.
• The Romans originally
• began a month with each
• new crescent moon,
• and, like the Etruscans,
• counted eight days
• per week,
• which made each year
• ten or eleven days short.
• The Julian calendar year
• counts 12 months
• and 365 days,
• and every four years
• adds a leap day
• to February.
• This calendar
• gains about three days
• every four centuries,
• still having room
• for improvement.

Intercalaries

• Whenever a pontif wished would insert
• a month between February and March
• to line up the calendar with astronomical events.
• Come the Julian calendar an intercalary day
• (our leap day) would be inserted,
• (every three or four years) at the end of February.

Local variations

• As officials adopted it they adapted it.
• In the decades after 46 BCE, across the Roman empire,
• localities retained features of their old calendars.
• The first days of the year and months,
• and in some cases the names of the months
• were out of synch in the Alexandrian calendar,
• the Asian calendar, the Syro-Macedonian calendar,
• the Cappadocian calendar, the Cyprus calendar,
• and the calendars of the cities of Syria and Palestine.
• Moreover, regions on the edges of the empire,
• Gaul, Greece, Macedon, the Balkans, and Judea
• continued to use their unreformed calendars.

Calends, nundinae, and ides

• April Fools day would be
• the Aphrodite calends.
• The market days were the nundines,
• the Sunday of their eight-day week.
• March fifteenth was the ides of March,
• which Shakespeare’s soothsayer
• warned Julius Caesar to beware of.
• He knew where he stood,
• but it did him little good.