fasti, may well have been related to this process.^148 Cn. Flavius was closely
involved with the reform of the tribal system in the late fourth-century Roman
Republic; these politically inclusivist changes, which also entailed the exten-
sion of the City’sterritorium, and responded to Rome’s expansion from a
small city state to a dominant, widelyflung power in central Italy, may have
necessitated the reorganization of the calendar and its publication as a com-
monly known,fixed scheme.^149 The institution of a partiallyfixed calendar
withfixed month-lengths, whenever exactly it occurred, was a significant step
towards the fullfixation of the Roman calendar in 46BCE, and is likely to have
been guided by not dissimilar motivations.
The Julian calendar: structure and institutionIn 46BCEJulius Caesar instituted a new calendar consisting of a completely
fixed 365-day year, but with the regular intercalation of one day every four
years (the ‘leap year’)—the same as our modern calendar today.^150 The
influence of the Egyptian calendar on the institution of this new calendar is
evident in two respects:firstly, the Julian year-length of 365 days, which had
no antecedent in Roman tradition and which was distinctive of the Egyptian
civil calendar; and secondly, the mere fact that the Julian calendar was
completely fixed and free from political control—which, in the ancient
world, had always been unique to Egypt. The influence of the Egyptian
calendar is acknowledged, in fact, in a number of ancient sources.^151 Appian
reports that when Caesar was in Egypt, restoring Cleopatra to the throne (in
48 – 7 BCE), he made inquiries about the Egyptian calendar and on this basis
later converted the Roman calendar to a solar scheme‘in the manner of the
(^148) Rüpke (1995) 235–42. The 2nd-c. BCE annalist Tuditanus, cited in Macrobius,Saturnalia
- 21, implies that it was the same Decemviri who added two tables to the Ten (hence‘Twelve
Tables’) and legislated on the intercalation (Tuditanus refert...decemviros,qui decem tabulis
duas addiderunt, de intercalando populum rogasse). By contrast, however, the almost contempo-
rary codification of laws in the city states of Greece, which Rüpke (1995) 236 himself cites as a
parallel, may well have led to the publication of detailed festival lists but certainly did not lead to
thefixation of Greek calendars or to their conversion to non-lunar schemes (see Ch. 1).
- 21, implies that it was the same Decemviri who added two tables to the Ten (hence‘Twelve
(^149) Humm (2000); see also Oakley (2000) 613. The sources (above, n. 147) explicitly relate
Flavius’publication of thefastito his radical political activities.
(^150) See in general Bickerman (1968) 47–51 and Samuel (1972) 155–8. The modern‘Gregori-
an’calendar is identical with the Julian calendar with the only exception that the leap year is
omitted three times in 400 years. 151
e.g. Dio 43. 26 and Macrobius,Saturnalia1. 14. 3. Some ancient authors, however, prefer
implicitly to de-emphasize the Egyptian origins of the Julian calendar: Pliny (NaturalHistory18.
211) classifies it as separate from the calendars of the Chaldaeans, Egyptians, and Greeks, and the
emperor Julian (Hymn to KingHelios41, 155 A–B) presents Romans and Egyptians as indepen-
dently reckoning a solar calendar from archaic times. For the dismissal of an early-20th-c. theory
that the Julian calendar was derived from the Greek Callippic cycle, see Lehoux (2007) 79–80.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 211