calendar as a purely scientific exercise, with Caesar engaging a team of
philosophers and mathematicians (i.e. astronomers) to design, under his
patronage, a faultless solar calendar.
But most authors prefer to emphasize the political dimension of this
calendar reform. Suetonius presents the institution of the Julian calendar as
thefirst measure taken by Caesar, as dictator, to‘tidy up the Roman State’.He
goes on to imply that Caesar’s main concern was to ensure that the festivals
occurred in the right seasons; but even here, the opportunity is not lost to
emphasize that the disruption of the calendar in the Republican period, with
the effect that‘harvest festivals no longer occurred in the summer, nor vintage
festivals in the autumn’, was the fault of the pontiffs who had abused their
authority over the intercalation.^172 More details, along these lines, are sug-
gested by later authors. Censorinus (third centuryCE) explains that in the
Republican period, the pontiffs in charge of the intercalation had acted out of
hatred and friendship, and through intercalation had extended or reduced the
length of tenure of magistrates and tax collectors in order to cause them either
profits or losses. Because the calendar had become disrupted, Julius Caesar, as
pontifex maximus, corrected the effect of past abuse and prevented future
error by instituting afixed, solar calendar.^173
None of these explanations should be discarded as implausible. The dis-
crepancy between the festivals and the seasons would have disturbed any
Roman, even if this did not necessarily justify the abolition of the Republican
calendar (as I have argued above). The image of Caesar as a patron of
astronomical and calendrical sciences, although perhaps exaggerated in Plu-
tarch’s account, is not incompatible with what is otherwise known about
Caesar and late Roman Republican society.^174 The credit of having created
and instituted an accurate solar calendar—which, to repeat, would have been
unique until then in the whole of Antiquity^175 —should have given Caesar
(^172) Suetonius,Julius Caesar, 40:conversus hinc ad ordinandum rei publicae statum, fastos
correxit iam pridemvitio pontificum per intercalandi licentiam adeo turbatosutneque messium
feriae aestate nequevindemiarumautumno competerent. Compare Ovid,Fasti3. 155–6,sed
tamen errabant etiam tunc tempora, donec / Caesaris in multis haecquoquecura fuit(‘but the
times were still wandering around, until Caesar took charge of this along with many other
things’), which may be interpreted as describing both a scientific correction of the Roman
calendar, and a political rectification of the Roman world: Feeney (2007) 202–3 sees in this
passage‘a microcosm or even an allegory of the Roman world, moving from a ramshakle
freedom to increasing regulation under the Caesars 173 ’(more on this below).
Censorinus 20. 7–8. Similar comments are made by Solinus (1. 43–4), Ammianus Mar-
cellinus (26. 1. 12–13), and Macrobius (Saturnalia1. 14. 1).
(^174) See Rawson (1985), esp. 162–7 (on astronomy in the late Roman Republic).
(^175) Conformity to the solar year should not be confused, however, with conformity to‘natural
time’or with‘astronomical accuracy’(paceFeeney 2007: 193–7). Many calendars before the
Julian were equally astronomically accurate—in particular, the Babylonian calendar in relation to
the moon—but what distinguished the Julian calendar as unique was itssolaraccuracy, and
hence its conformity to the seasonal year.
218 Calendars in Antiquity