If anyone was truly familiar with the messiness of the Roman calendar, it was Julius Caesar. It was this calendar that controlled the economic, religious, and civic life of the Republic, and each day had a status attached to it: whether it was permissible or prohibited to bring cases to court, or conduct government business. (This later calendar was also retroactively attributed to Romulus.)īy the time Julius Caesar began his political career, the calendar had undergone enough changes that it begins to resemble our own: 12 months of either 31 or 29 days on a four year cycle, with a month added in years 2 and 4, and February being either 28, 23, or 24 days. It appears that the winter was just…ignored, which may seem baffling to us, but for a culture whose primary functions were farming, and later military campaigns, it may well have made sense. A later innovation imposed a 9 day week (where the last day of the week was also the first day of the next week, because Romans loved counting things inclusively), and 10 months of 30 or 31 days each. The origins and underlying logic of the early Roman calendar are a bit murky: legend is that Romulus, the founder of Rome, created a lunar calendar based on observation of the moon’s phases. A reproduction of the Fasti Antiates Maiores, a painted wall-calendar from the late Roman Republic via Wikimedia Commons Cincinnatus, a legendary elder statesman and hero of the Republic, would serve as needed in times of military warfare and plebeian uprisings, but would always return to his farm, inspiring George Washington and other Revolutionary War figures to idealize an agrarian United States. Up until the year before Caesar’s death, the Roman calendar was a bit of a disaster, at least if you were trying to use it for things like “what season is it,” “when do I plant my wheat,” or “when should the pigs be suckled”? These examples may seem simplistic, but it’s important to remember that the Roman Republic was at its heart an agrarian society: when soldiers retired, they were given farmland to work. What does “Ides” mean? Why that day? And what was the Julian Calendar all about, anyway? This day, on the Roman calendar of the time, was the Ides of March. On this day in 44 BCE, Dictator for Life Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by members of the Roman Senate, stabbed 23 times in what the conspirators believed was an act that would save the Republic and stop Caesar’s advancement toward becoming the King of Rome.
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