The Julian calendar, a reform of the Roman calendar The Roman calendar changed its form several times in the time between the foundation of Rome and the fall of the Roman Empire. This article generally discusses the early Roman or 'pre-Julian' calendars. The calendar used after 46 BC is discussed under Julian calendar, was introduced by Julius Caesar Gaius Julius Cæsar/Caesar was a Roman military and political leader. He played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire in 46 BC, and came into force in 45 BC (709 ab urbe condita Ab urbe condita is Latin for "from the founding of the City (Rome)", traditionally set in 753 BC. AUC is a year-numbering system used by some ancient Roman historians to identify particular Roman years. Renaissance editors sometimes added AUC to Roman manuscripts they published, giving the false impression that the Romans usually). It was chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria Sosigenes of Alexandria was named by Pliny the Elder as the astronomer consulted by Julius Caesar for the design of the Julian calendar. It appears that little or nothing is known about him apart from two references in Pliny's Natural History. Some web sources say that the calendar was designed by Aristarchus about 200 years earlier — it is not and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year A tropical year , for general purposes, is the length of time that the Sun takes to return to the same position in the cycle of seasons, as seen from Earth; for example, the time from vernal equinox to vernal equinox, or from summer solstice to summer solstice. Since antiquity, astronomers have progressively refined the definition of the tropical, known at least since Hipparchus Hipparchus or Hipparch was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of the Hellenistic period. He was the founder of Trigonometry. It has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months, and a leap day February 29 in the Gregorian calendar, the most widely used today, is a date that occurs only once every four years, in years evenly divisible by 4, such as 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 or 2016 . These are called leap years. February 29 is the 60th day of the Gregorian calendar in such a year, with 306 days remaining until the end of that year. It is added to February every four years. Hence the Julian year is on average 365.25 days long.
The Julian calendar remained in use into the 20th century in some countries as a civil calendar A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the, but has been replaced by the Gregorian calendar The Gregorian calendar is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter gravissimas. The reformed calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries in nearly all countries.[1] The Roman Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with more than a billion members. The Church's leader is the Pope who holds supreme authority in concert with the College of Bishops of which he is the head. A communion of the Western church and 22 autonomous Eastern Catholic churches (called and Protestant Protestantism is one of the four major divisions within Christianity together with the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Oriental Orthodox churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. The term is most closely tied to those groups that separated from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation churches have replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar, but the Orthodox Church The Orthodox Church, also officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church[note 1] and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, asserts that it is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church established by Jesus Christ and his Apostles almost 2,000 years ago. The Church is composed of several self-governing ecclesial bodies, each (with the exception of Estonia and Finland) still use the Julian calendar for calculating the dates of moveable feasts In Christianity, a moveable feast or movable feast is a holy day — a feast day or a fast day — whose date is not fixed to a particular day of the calendar year but moves in response to the date of Easter, the date of which varies according to a complex formula. Easter is itself a "moveable feast".[citation needed]. Some Orthodox churches have adopted the Revised Julian calendar The Revised Julian calendar or, less formally, New Calendar, is a calendar, originated in 1923, which effectively discontinued the 340 years of divergence between the naming of dates sanctioned by those Eastern Orthodox churches adopting it and the Gregorian calendar that has come to predominate worldwide. In 2800 the two calendars will diverge for the observance of fixed feasts, while other Orthodox churches retain the Julian calendar for all purposes.[2] The Julian calendar is still used by the Berber people Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are discontinuously distributed from the Atlantic to the Siwa oasis, in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger River. Historically they spoke various Berber languages, which together form a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Today many of them speak of North Africa North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes seven countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania, and, and on Mount Athos Mount Athos is a mountain on the peninsula of the same name in Macedonia, of northern Greece, called in Greek Agion Oros (Άγιον Όρος, transliterated often as Hagion Oros), or in English, "Holy Mountain". In Classical times, the peninsula was called Akté (Ακτή) (sometimes Acte or Akte). Politically it is known in Greece as.
The notation "Old Style" (OS) Old Style and New Style (or N.S.) are used in English language historical studies either to indicate that the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (NS) even though contemporary documents use a different start of year (OS); or to indicate that a date conforms to the Julian calendar (OS), formerly in use in many countries, is sometimes used to indicate a date in the Julian calendar, as opposed to "New Style" (NS) Old Style and New Style (or N.S.) are used in English language historical studies either to indicate that the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (NS) even though contemporary documents use a different start of year (OS); or to indicate that a date conforms to the Julian calendar (OS), formerly in use in many countries,, which either represents the Julian date with the start of the year as 1 January or a full mapping onto the Gregorian calendar The Gregorian calendar is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter gravissimas. The reformed calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries. This notation is used in reference to dates from tsarist Russia (the country did not switch to the new calendar until 1918).
Contents |
Motivation
The ordinary year in the previous Roman calendar consisted of 12 months, for a total of 355 days. In addition, a 27-day intercalary month, the Mensis Intercalaris, was sometimes inserted between February and March. This intercalary month was formed by inserting 22 days after the first 23 or 24 days of February; the last five days of February, which counted down toward the start of March, become the last five days of Intercalaris. The net effect was to add 22 or 23 days to the year, forming an intercalary year of 377 or 378 days.[3]
According to the later writers Censorinus He was the author of a lost work De Accentibus and of an extant treatise De Die Natali, written in 238, and dedicated to his patron Quintus Caerellius as a birthday gift. The contents are of a varied character: the natural history of man, the influence of the stars and genii, music, religious rites, astronomy, the doctrines of the Greek and Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius was a Roman grammarian and Neoplatonist philosopher who flourished during the reigns of Honorius and Arcadius, the ideal intercalary cycle consisted of ordinary years of 355 days alternating with intercalary years, alternately 377 and 378 days long. On this system, the average Roman year would have had 366¼ days over four years, giving it an average drift of one day per year relative to any solstice A solstice is an astronomical event that happens twice each year when the Sun's apparent position in the sky reaches its northernmost or southernmost extremes. The name is derived from the Latin sol and sistere (to stand still), because at the solstices, the Sun stands still in declination; that is, the apparent movement of the Sun's path north or or equinox An equinox occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the centre of the Sun being in the same plane as the Earth's equator. The term equinox can also be used in a broader sense, meaning the date when such a passage happens. The name "equinox" is derived from the Latin aequus. Macrobius describes a further refinement wherein, for 8 years out of 24, there were only three intercalary years, each of 377 days. This refinement averages the length of the year to 365¼ days over 24 years. In practice, intercalations did not occur schematically according to these ideal systems, but were determined by the pontifices The Pontifex Maximus was the high priest of the Ancient Roman College of Pontiffs (Collegium Pontificum). This was the most important position in the ancient Roman religion, open only to patricians until 254 BC, when a plebeian first occupied this post. A distinctly religious office under the early Roman Republic, it gradually became politicized. So far as can be determined from the historical evidence, they were much less regular than these ideal schemes suggest. They usually occurred every second or third year, but were sometimes omitted for much longer, and occasionally occurred in two consecutive years.
If managed correctly this system allowed the Roman year, on average, to stay roughly aligned to a tropical year. However, since the Pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate's term of office An official is someone who holds an office in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority (either his own or that of his superior and/or employer, public or legally private) corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a Pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power. If too many intercalations were omitted, as happened after the Second Punic War The Second Punic War, also referred to as The Hannibalic War and The War Against Hannibal, lasted from 218 to 201 BC and involved combatants in the western and eastern Mediterranean. This was the second major war between Carthage and the Roman Republic, with the participation of the Berbers on Carthage's side. The two states had three major and during the Civil Wars List of civil wars involving Rome. There were several Roman civil wars, especially during the time of the late Republic, the calendar would drift rapidly out of alignment with the tropical year. Moreover, because intercalations were often determined quite late, the average Roman citizen often did not know the date, particularly if he were some distance from the city. For these reasons, the last years of the pre-Julian calendar were later known as "years of confusion". The problems became particularly acute during the years of Julius Caesar's pontificate before the reform, 63–46 BC, when there were only five intercalary months, whereas there should have been eight, and none at all during the five Roman years before 46 BC. For example, Caesar crossed the Rubicon The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeastern Italy, about 30 kilometers long, running from the Apennine Mountains to the Adriatic Sea through the southern Emilia-Romagna region, between the towns of Rimini and Cesena. The Latin word rubico comes from the adjective 'rubeus', meaning 'red'. The river was so named because its waters are colored red on January 10, 49 BC of the official calendar, but the official calendar had drifted so far away from the seasons that it was actually mid-autumn.
The reform was intended to correct this problem permanently, by creating a calendar that remained aligned to the sun without any human intervention. This feature was exploited very soon after the new calendar came into effect. Varro Marcus Terentius Varro , also known as Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus, was a Roman scholar and writer used it in 37 B.C. to fix calendar dates for the start of the four seasons, which would have been impossible only 8 years earlier.[4] A century later, when Pliny Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian. Spending most of his spare time studying, writing or investigating natural and geographic phenomena in the field, he wrote an gave the dates (established by Caesar) of some natural and astronomical phenomena along the year, such as the dates of the solstices and the equinoxes (the 8th day before the calends of January, April, July and October (25 December, 25 March, 24 June, 24 September, respectively)),[5] this stability had become an ordinary fact of life.
Context of the reform
The approximation of 365¼ days for the tropical year had been known for a long time but was not used directly since ancient calendars were not solar (except in Egypt). It was the mean length of the year in the octaeteris, a cycle of 8 lunar years popularized by Cleostratus Cleostratus was an astronomer of ancient Greece. He was a native of Tenedos, and the Chaldean astronomer Naburimannu may have been a contemporary of him. He is believed by some scholars to have introduced the zodiac (beginning with Aries and Sagittarius) and the solar calendar to Greece from Babylonia. Censorinus (De Die Natali, c. 18) considers (and also commonly attributed to Eudoxus) which was used in some early Greek calendars, notably in Athens The Attic calendar is a hellenic calendar that was in use in ancient Attica, the ancestral territory of the Athenian polis. This article focuses on the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the classical period that produced some of the most significant works of ancient Greek literature. Because of the relative wealth of evidence from Athens it is the best. The same value was the basis of the 76 years cycle devised by Callippus Callippus or Calippus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician (a student under Eudoxus) to improve the Metonic cycle. The length of the year in the cycle of Meton The Metonic cycle or Enneadecaeteris in astronomy and calendar studies is a particular approximate common multiple of the tropical year and the synodic month. The Greek astronomer Meton of Athens observed that a period of 19 tropical years is almost exactly equal to 235 synodic months, and rounded to full days counts 6940 days. The difference was less accurate: about 30 minutes too long (1 day in 48 years).
In Egypt, a fixed year The ancient civil Egyptian calendar has a year that is 365 days long and is divided into 12 months of 30 days each, plus five extra days at the end of the year. The months are divided into three weeks of ten days each. Because the ancient Egyptian year is almost a quarter of a day shorter than the solar year and stellar events "wandered" of 365 days was in use, drifting by one day against the sun in four years. An unsuccessful attempt to add an extra day every fourth year was made in 238 BC (Decree of Canopus). Caesar probably experienced the solar calendar in that country. He landed in the Nile delta in October 48 BC and soon became embroiled in the Ptolemaic dynastic war, especially when Cleopatra Cleopatra VII Philopator (in Greek, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ; was the last person to rule Egypt as an Egyptian pharaoh – after she died, Egypt became a Roman province managed to be "introduced" to him in Alexandria Alexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving approximately 80% of Egypt's imports and exports. Alexandria is also an important tourist resort. Alexandria extends about 32 km (20 mi) along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in north-central Egypt. It is home to the. Caesar imposed a peace, and a banquet was held to celebrate the event. Lucan Marcus Annaeus Lucanus , better known in English as Lucan, was a Roman poet, born in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), in the Hispania Baetica. Despite his short life, he is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Silver Latin period. His youth and speed of composition set him apart from other poets depicted Caesar talking to a wise man called Acoreus during the feast, stating his intention to create a calendar more perfect than that of Eudoxus[6] (Eudoxus was popularly credited with having determined the length of the year to be 365¼ days).[7] But the war soon resumed and Caesar was attacked by the Egyptian army for several months until he achieved victory. He then enjoyed a long cruise on the Nile with Cleopatra before leaving the country in June 47 BC.[8]
Caesar returned to Rome in 46 BC and, according to Plutarch Plutarch, born Plutarchos then, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Μέστριος Πλούταρχος), c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He was born to a prominent family in Chaeronea, Boeotia, a town about twenty, called in the best philosophers and mathematicians of his time to solve the problem of the calendar.[9] Pliny Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian. Spending most of his spare time studying, writing or investigating natural and geographic phenomena in the field, he wrote an says that Caesar was aided in his reform by the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria Sosigenes of Alexandria was named by Pliny the Elder as the astronomer consulted by Julius Caesar for the design of the Julian calendar. It appears that little or nothing is known about him apart from two references in Pliny's Natural History. Some web sources say that the calendar was designed by Aristarchus about 200 years earlier — it is not[10] who is generally considered the principal designer of the reform. Sosigenes may also have been the author of the astronomical almanac published by Caesar to facilitate the reform.[11] Eventually, it was decided to establish a calendar that would be a combination between the old Roman months, the fixed length of the Egyptian calendar, and the 365¼ days of the Greek astronomy. According to Macrobius, Caesar was assisted in this by a certain Marcus Flavius.[12]
Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:27:34 GMT+00:00
Chicago Sun-Times (blog) We turned the pages on a big Advent Calendar , observed Saints Days, wore ashes on Ash Wednesday, announced what we were giving up for Lent. ...
unknown
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:50:33 GM
Today's names of the months date back to Roman times and therefore to Latin, which is why they are almost identical in German and English. Julius Cesar commissioned the current calendar. It was later named . Julian Calendar. in his honor ...
