(as opposed to the Macedonian calendars of Asia Minor and the Near East,
which all adapted to the Julian calendar) suggests that the survival of a lunar
calendar in Moesia was perhaps not a northward-looking, border phenome-
non, but rather in southward, territorial continuity with the lunar calendars of
Macedonia and the Greek peninsula, well inside the Roman Empire.
It is probably futile to seek a general explanation for the survival of lunar
calendars in the Roman Empire; it would also make little sense to treat them as
a single category, and these calendars can certainly not be all interpreted as
subversive or dissident. The focus of this chapter, however, is not on lunar
calendarsper se, but rather on calendars that I would consider‘dissident’or
‘subversive’. For this reason I shall not examine at further length the calendars
of Greek and other cities of the Roman East, which in spite of their mild
dissidence (inasmuch as they resisted the trend to conform, at least entirely, to
the Julian calendar) were nevertheless part of the official political establish-
ment of the Roman Empire (these calendars, moreover, have been sufficiently
well covered in Chapters 1 and 5). The Gallic, Jewish, and other calendars that
will be examined in this chapter were neither official nor under the control of
any official political authority. These lunar calendars are most appropriately
interpreted as politically dissident and subversive.
What made these calendars dissident was their insistence on remaining
lunar, in contrast to the official calendar (in the environment of which the
dissident calendars were used) that had become solar.What made them
subversive, however, was almost the reverse: a tendency to borrow features
of the politically dominant, official calendar, and to integrate these features
into the lunar calendar in an often overtly hybrid way. In the context of
dissidence, borrowing from the dominant culture may appear paradoxical
and self-defeating. But as has been shown in numerous post-colonial studies,
borrowing and hybridity can be profoundly subversive, and a source of
empowerment rather than a symptom of identity loss or cultural weakness:
for the appropriation of elements of the dominant culture, and the cultural
hybridity that results from this process, simultaneously undermine the culture
March. (2)Inscr. Beroia68 (Gounaropoulou and Hatzopoulos 1998) is dated 15 Panemos = 25
June 229CE. The new moon was visible on 10 June of that year in the evening. (3)Inscr. Beroia 69
is dated 17 Panemos = 25 June 240CE. The new moon was visible on 8 June of that year in the
evening. (4)AE1999: 1425 =SEG49. 815 from Thessalonika (but issued by the Macedonian
koinon) is dated 28 Panemos = 25 June 252CE. Although 25 June should have been the last day of
the lunar month (thus 29 or 30 Panemos), as the new moon was visible on that evening, the
calendar may have been running slightly late. (5)AE1999: 1427 =SEG49. 817, same provenance
and context, is dated 20 Hyperberetaios = 20 Sept. 260CE. This is the only non-lunar date (if the
month started at the conjunction on 24 Aug. 260CE, the date of the inscription should have been
24 Hyperberetaios); this date would suggest, instead, a Julian calendar with Macedonian month-
names. It seems unlikely that the calendar underwent such a radical change between 252 and 260
CE; we must rather conclude that this last date is either an error or a sloppy, approximate
equation. On the lunar calendar of Macedonia see further Ch. 3, near n. 89.
302 Calendars in Antiquity