b.c.e., noindividual older than the Julian reform could ever be in a position to
share Ovid ’s birth-anniversary, in the post-Julian sense, or indeed to have any con-
tinuous possession of his own.”^120
It is plausible to see the impact of the Julian reform making itself felt also in the
sudden new Augustan interest in the genre of the birthday poem. There are no
birthday poems in Catullus, interestingly, and Philodemus’s invitation to Piso to
join him on the morrow for the celebration of Epicurus’s “Twentieth,” certainly
pre-Julian in date, “does not qualify as a birthday poem.”^121 After the calendar
reform, however, Roman poets show a sustained and pointed interest in writing
poems on their own and on friends’ birthdays.^122 Tellingly, it is only under
Augustus that we first see Greeks writing in the tradition of the genethliacon,
“birthday poem.”^123 The first recorded practitioner, Crinagoras of Mytilene, was a
frequent sojourner in the city of Rome and mixed intimately with the highest cir-
cles there; three of his surviving epigrams, addressed to Greeks and Romans,
accompany, or ventriloquize as, birthday gifts, although they do not lay stress on
the return of the day in the way the Roman poems so often do.^124 It has been sug-
gested that Crinagoras’s initiative lies behind the Roman interest in the form;^125 it
is far more likely that this visitor was struck by the Roman interest in the anniver-
sary and adapted the form to his knowledge of “dedication” poems.
THE “SAME” DAY
The long-standing Roman interest in anniversaries gains new force, then, after
Caesar’s reform. In particular, the already strong Republican sense of the identity
of the day from year to year is now given new edge by the intuition that the same
identical span of time is linking the recurring day in every manifestation. This con-
ception of each particular day remaining the same day, whatever the year, is cer-
tainly one of the most striking features of the Roman anniversary mentality. I first
became properly aware of it over twenty years ago when I was marking a piece of
prose composition.^126 I had set my students the close of Ronald Syme ’s Roman
Revolution,the obituary notice of Augustus. One sentence in particular gave my
students trouble: “He died on the anniversary of the day when he assumed his first
consulate after the march on Rome.”^127 Dissatisfied with their solutions, and uncer-
tain how to do it myself, I was saved by the thought that Syme was artistically
grafting the end of the Roman Revolutiononto the beginning of Tacitus’s Annals,
making his masterpiece the prequel to Tacitus’s by writing the history of Augustus
that Tacitus had said he would write if he lived long enough (Ann.3.24.3).
- Years, Months, Days I: Eras and Anniversaries