(Chapter 4).In the Roman province of Asia, the radicaladaptation of thelocal
lunar calendar to the (solar) Julian calendar in 8 BCEis presented, in the
provincialdecree that has survived from the period, not as an administrative
convenience but as a show of politicalloyalty to the emperor Augustus and the
Roman Empire (Chapter 5 ).
The decree and calendar reform of 8BCE, which was matched in most other
provinces and cities of Asia Minor and the Roman Near East, was not an
empty politicalgesture but contributed, in very realterms, to the culturaland
politicalcohesion of the Roman Empire. For in spite of the tremendous
diversity that characterized the calendars of the Roman East, alegacy of the
Seleucid Empire’s fragmentation into smallkingdoms and city states in the
second andfirst centuriesBCEthat the Romans were never able to reverse,
the‘Julianization’of these calendars in the early Roman imperialperiod
enabled the 365¼-day year of the Julian calendar to function atleast as
common denominator between them, as thehemerologiaoflate Antiquity
were able to exemplify, and as onlyafixed scheme such as the Julian calendar
could have achieved (Chapter 5 ). The impact of the Julian or Julianized
calendars is evident also in the context of thelunar calendars in the Roman
Empire thatIhave interpreted as dissident, because they integrated, in a rather
hybrid manner, severalaspects of the dominantfixed calendar. Even if their
intention was subversive, these calendars participated, in a certain way, in the
common culture that the Julian calendar had generated (Chapter 6). After
Constantine’s conversion, the imposition (with various degrees of success) of a
single computation of the date of Easter for the whole Empire—which only
fixed Easter cycles made possible—and, as a corollary, the condemnation of
any deviation from the ‘orthodox’ computation as ‘heretical’—a hitherto
unprecedented negative attitude, in the ancient world, towards calendar di-
versity—represented thelogicalculmination of along process offixation,
schematization, and unification of calendars that had begun in the great
empires one millennium earlier (Chapter 7).
In short, it is in the context of the great empires that ancient calendars
evolved fromlunar to solar, empiricalto schematic, andflexibletofixed. The
institution of innovativefixed schemes as officialcalendars (e.g. thePersian
Zoroastrian calendar in the Achaemenid Empire, the Julian calendar in the
Roman Empire), or alternatively, the transformation of empiricallunar calen-
dars intofixedlunar schemes (e.g. the Babylonian calendar in the Seleucid
Empire, the Easter cycles inlate antiqueChristendom), was as much a matter
of administrative convenience as of imperialideology.In the context of the
great empires, indeed, these calendars became an effective medium for politi-
calunity and culturalcohesion.
A number of theoreticalissues that have been raised in the course of this
work remain unresolved: in particular, the question of whether discrete
historicalevents can be viewed as part of much wider, macro-historical
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