discussed in the previous section), but now in terms their administration.
The administration of large empires had a more practical, and possibly more
explicit, effect on the development of calendars than the implicit, structural
forces that I have suggested above. As we have seen in this chapter, it is in
the context of large empires that in the second half of thefirst millennium
BCE the Egyptian calendar, or Egyptian-type calendars, was adopted for
official imperial use. Although there may have been specific reasons, in
each case, for suchfixed calendars to be adopted, it remains a fact—whether
or not explicitly acknowledged by those who instituted them—that these
calendars were also efficient tools for the administration of extensive impe-
rial territories. This observation is highly relevant to the institution of the
Julian calendar. In the two decades preceding Caesar’s dictatorship, the
Roman Empire had expanded dramatically with the creation of new pro-
vinces in north-western Europe, Asia Minor, and the Near East. Cicero’s
proconsulship in the distant, newly formed province of Cilicia in 51/0BCE—
where the difficulty of knowing whether the year had been intercalated in
Rome became, for him, a major issue (see above, n. 180)—provides a good
example of how the Roman calendar had become inadequate for the
administration of a far-flung empire. By the time of Caesar’s dictatorship,
the Roman Empire had sufficiently expanded to necessitate the adoption, as
in the other great empires of earlier centuries, of afixed and standard
official calendar. In this respect, the institution of the Julian calendar was
the next stage of a grand, macro-historical trajectory.
It remains unknown, however, whether these administrative considera-
tions—any more than a need for structural replication of the new, autocratic
political system (as discussed in the previous section)—explicitlymotivated the
institution of a calendar such as Caesar’s. It is not impossible that Caesar
sensed the imperial administrative value of afixed calendar, and this may have
played some part in the institution of the Julian calendar, but there is no
explicit evidence of this in any of the ancient sources.^188 Caesar is certainly
unlikely to have realized that his institutionfitted into a wider, macro-histori-
cal trend that had been developing through the lastfive centuries. Even if he
did realize this, it would have mattered little to him. From his perspective, the
Julian calendar served only the specific purposes for which he had instituted it:
it was, in this sense, a micro-historical event. The relationship between micro-
historical motivations and macro-historical trends remains therefore unclear,
even if in this case—the institution of the Julian calendar—they seem to have
converged and supported each other. It is perhaps the mutual corroboration of
these micro- and macro-historical factors that enabled the institution of the
Julian calendar to succeed.
(^188) See the reserved comments of Rüpke (1995) 371.
224 Calendars in Antiquity