imitates, in its concept and design, the Roman tradition of monumental
calendar inscriptions.^29
Another important indication that the Coligny calendar was conceived
under Roman influence is that it is schematic andfixed. For it is more than
likely that the lunar calendar in Gaul was originally empirical (based on lunar
observations) andflexible, as everywhere else in early Antiquity, and to some
extent, as I have suggested above, it may still have been so in the Roman
period; in this empirical calendar, the length of months and hence their
determination asmatuoranmatu(good and ungood) would have been
completely variable. The concept of afixed scheme with alternating 29- and
30-day months and months permanently designated asmatuoranmatuis
likely to have arisen by imitation or emulation of the Julian calendar, which
had the distinctive and, in the context of earlier Antiquity, the unique charac-
teristic of being schematic andfixed.^30
The somewhat romantic theory of pre-Roman origins is partly built on the
assumption that the Coligny calendar was the product of a very ancient Gallic,
druidic tradition of astronomical inquiry.^31 But however much astronomy was
(^29) McCluskey andWoolf loc. cit. Olmsted’s claim (1992: 71) that the calendar of Coligny,
‘aside from the numerals and lettering, shows no Latin influence whatsoever’may be correct (if
Latin refers only to the language), but it is misleading, as it obfuscates the Roman characteristics
of this inscription.
(^30) On the uniqueness offixed calendars in early Antiquity, which only came about in the
latter half of thefirst millenniumBCEby derivation from the Egyptian calendar, see Ch. 4.
Olmsted (1992) 15–25, 106, 132–4 believes that the Coligny calendar, or rather an earlier version
based on the 30-year cycle, goes back to the earlyfirst millenniumBCE; the 25-year cycle of
Coligny would have been instituted in the 2nd–1st cc.BCE, before the Roman conquest of Gaul.
His argument depends entirely on a backward projection of the medieval Irish calendar, and thus
on the assumptions,first that the same calendar was used by the Irish continuously throughout
this period, and secondly that all Celtic peoples (or at least the Irish and the Gauls) reckoned this
same calendar throughout Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These assumptions are unjusti-
fied and historically implausible. Olmsted (1992) 71–4 argues further that only in the pre-Roman
period would the druids and Gallic aristocracy have had the socio-economic resources to design
this calendar; but this is to underestimate the social and economic standing of the Gallo-Roman
aristocracies in the Roman period (on which seeWoolf 1998). Olmsted treats the 2.8% incidence
of scribal errors in the calendar’s notations as evidence of a long process of manuscript
transmission (ibid. 11–12, 71, and table 58), but errors such as these could equally have been
committed near the time, or even at the time, of original redaction. Olmsted himself remarks that
the TII notation system (and the 25-year cycle that comes with it) is too complex not to have
been invented in a literate society, which is why he pushes it to the last decades before the Roman
conquest (ibid. 73–4, 112); but on this argument, the Roman period is equally well, if not better,
suited. 31
Duval and Pinault loc. cit. (referring to the calendar as going back to‘la nuit des temps’)
and 399–400, Olmsted (1992). In this context, a passage from Julius Caesar,BellumGallicum6.
- 6 is frequently cited, according to which the druids had‘many discussions regarding the stars
and their motions’(Duval and Pinault loc. cit., Olmsted 1992: 2). Unfortunately, however, this
brief comment of Caesar’s—for what it is worth—does not tell us how much or what kind of
astronomical knowledge the druids actually had in the pre-Roman period.
Dissidence and Subversion 309