Look at a calendar and you are looking at one of the most successful pieces of Roman propaganda ever produced. Two of its months are named after men, two after gods and several after festivals, and the whole system is still in use two thousand years later in places that have never been under Roman rule. It was also, for a long time, a mess.
The ten-month year
According to Roman tradition, the first calendar, attributed to Romulus, had ten months and began in March, the month of Mars, the god of war. It ran for 304 days, from March to December, and then there was a stretch of winter that was not counted. That is why the last four months of our year are named after numbers: September (from septem, seven), October (octo, eight), November (novem, nine) and December (decem, ten). The numbers made sense when the year started in March. They do not now.
The next king, Numa Pompilius, is said to have added January and February to cover the winter. Even then the year did not match the seasons, and priests had to add an extra month from time to time, which gave them considerable political power: they could lengthen the year of an official they liked and shorten one they did not. By the time of Julius Caesar, the calendar was so out of sync that the seasons were months off. In 46 BCE, he reformed it with advice from an Alexandrian astronomer and gave us the year of 365 days with a leap day every four years. The year 46 BCE had 445 days and is known as “the year of confusion.”
Who is who
- January is named for Janus, the god of doorways, gates and beginnings, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. The Romans prayed to him before any new venture. His temple in the Forum had doors that were opened in war and closed in peace.
- February comes from februa, a Latin word for purification. The festival of Februa was held in the middle of the month and was a time of cleansing before the new year, which in the old calendar was about to begin.
- March is Mars’s month, the god of war, but also an agricultural god. It was the start of the military campaigning season, and the beginning of the old year.
- April has no sure origin. The Romans may have connected it to aperire, “to open,” as the buds of spring open. Another theory links it to Aphrodite through an Etruscan form of her name. The ancient writers themselves disagreed.
- May probably comes from Maia, a goddess of growth, though the Romans offered other explanations, such as maiores, “elders.”
- June honors Juno, the queen of the gods and the protector of women and marriage. June is still popular for weddings.
- July was originally called Quintilis, “the fifth month.” After Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, the Senate renamed it Julius in his honor.
- August was Sextilis, “the sixth month.” In 8 BCE, the Senate renamed it for Augustus, the first emperor, who had won some of his greatest victories in that month.
A story that is often told says that Augustus took a day from February to make August as long as July. Historians now think it is a later invention. August always had thirty-one days.
Days as well
The days of the week are also Roman, passed through the languages of Europe. In French, lundi is the Moon’s day, mardi Mars’s, mercredi Mercury’s, jeudi Jupiter’s, vendredi Venus’s. The Spanish and Italian forms are similar. Saturday survives in English as Saturn’s day, and Sunday as the day of the sun.
Rome at the kitchen wall
Why a calendar is called a calendar
The Romans counted the days of the month in an unusual way, and the words have survived. The first day of every month was the Kalends, from a verb meaning “to call out,” because a priest announced the arrival of the new moon. It was also the day on which debts were due, and so the account book in which a moneylender recorded his loans was a calendarium. That is the origin of our word “calendar.” The middle of the month, on the 13th or 15th, was the Ides, and the ninth day before it was the Nones. Days were counted backward from these three fixed points, so that a Roman would say “the third day before the Kalends of March.” The Ides of March, March 15, was the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE.
The eleven days that vanished
Caesar’s calendar was almost perfect, but not quite. It added a little over eleven minutes a year to the real solar year, and by the sixteenth century the error had piled up to ten days. Pope Gregory XIII reformed it, and in 1582, the day after Thursday, October 4, was Friday, October 15. Catholic countries made the switch at once. Protestant ones were slower. Britain and its colonies, including those in America, did not adopt the new calendar until 1752, by which time the difference was eleven days: September 2 was followed by September 14. A popular story tells of angry mobs shouting “Give us back our eleven days!” but historians doubt that it happened. What certainly did happen is that people grumbled about rent. And George Washington’s birthday, originally February 11, became February 22.
There is something satisfying about the idea that when you write a date, you are speaking Latin. You are honoring a two-faced god of doors, a god of war, a queen of heaven and two men who were very good at public relations. The Romans built roads and aqueducts, but they also gave us a way of counting the days. Everyone uses it. Hardly anyone knows.
