progression from it. Already in the sixteenth century, Scaliger wrote that‘the
Julian calendar...marked a victory in the realm of culture more lasting than
any Roman victory on land and sea’, by contrast with the pre-Julian Republi-
can calendar of which he earlier remarked:‘no nation in human memory has
used a worse calendar’.^170 The Julian calendar was simply much better—with
its regularity, predictability, and conformity to the solar year—and repre-
sented the most appropriate solution to the calendrical chaos that had reigned
in the Republican period.
The question, however, deserves to be asked, because irregular calendars
were actually quite normal in the ancient world. As we have seen in Chapter 1,
the Greeks happily maintained irregular and unpredictable calendars for quite
a long time—perhaps till the end of Antiquity—without any calendar reform.
The same could have equally endured in Rome. The 90-day shortfall that had
accumulated by the beginning of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship could have been
simply corrected through somead hocmeasure, either with one long, 445-day
year—which Caesar anyway had to decree in 46 BCE—or with a run of
consecutive intercalated years. The abolition of the old calendar was certainly
not necessary or called for. Indeed, this was not thefirst time in history that
the Roman calendar had lagged to such an extent: as we have seen, in the early
second centuryBCEthe Roman calendar had been nearly four months behind
(much more than 90 days), without being abolished as a result.Why Julius
Caesar instituted an entirely new calendar demands, therefore, to be ex-
plained.What we perceive today as the intrinsic superiority of the Julian
calendar is not sufficient to explain why, at the time, it was instituted.^171
It may be instructive to begin with the ancient sources, even though they
were written long after the event, in the second centuryCEand later. These
sources suggest that the institution of the Julian calendar was motivated by a
number of factors: Caesar’s interest in Egyptian and solar calendars, his
concern that in the old calendar festivals were liable to occur in the wrong
seasons, andfinally, his resolve to stamp out the abuse of the pontiffs in charge
of the intercalation. These distinct motivations, which may be respectively
categorized as intellectual, religious, and political, are difficult, in the sources,
to separate or unravel. Nevertheless, ancient authors tend emphasize one or
the other. Appian emphasizes (and perhaps exaggerates) Caesar’s personal
interest in the Egyptian calendar, suggesting that whilst in Egypt he made
inquiries about the local calendar and on this basis converted the Roman
calendar to a solar scheme‘in the manner of the Egyptians’(see above, n. 152).
In a similar vein, Plutarch (Caesar59) presents the institution of the Julian
(^170) Joseph Scaliger,De Emendatione Temporum(1583), cited in Feeney (2007) 193.
(^171) Rüpke (1995) 593–6 presents the various reforms of the Roman calendar, culminating
with the Julian reform, as a series of‘technical improvements’. This observation may be correct,
but does not explain in itselfwhythese reforms were made.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 217