been lunar—were rapidly superseded by the calendar of the Roman Empire
and even, perhaps, obliterated from memory.^195
The Julian calendar also spread very rapidly to the East, reaching most of
the eastern Mediterranean by the end of thefirst centuryBCEand penetrating
further into the Near East during thefirst–third centuriesCE, as the Roman
Empire was gradually expanding into this region. In the East, however, the
Julian calendar was generally not adopted wholesale as in theWest. The
Eastern cities and provinces adapted the structure of the Julian calendar to
their local calendrical traditions, leading to a proliferation of different calen-
dars with, as only common feature, afixed 365-day year. It is only at the end of
Antiquity, from the sixth centuryCE, that the Julian calendar itself came to be
widely used in Greece, Asia Minor, and parts of the Levant such as Palestine
and Arabia (Samuel 1972: 187–8, Meimaris 1992: 41–5).
The differentiation and fragmentation of the Julian calendar in the Roman
East, which reflected in many cases the patriotism of individual cities and their
sentiment (orfiction) of independence from the Roman Empire, perpetuated in
fact a tradition of calendar fragmentation that had always prevailed in Greece
(see Chapter 1) and that had also established itself in the Near East after the
break-up of the Seleucid Empire. The Julian calendar in the Near East and its
fragmentation will be one of the subjects of the next chapter. For now, the impact
of the Julian calendar as a unifying force in the Roman East needs to be given
emphasis. The institution of Julian or Julian-type solar calendars (displacing the
earlier, Near Eastern lunar calendars), which happened rapidly and often simul-
taneously with the annexation of Near Eastern cities and provinces into the
Roman Empire, was an important part of the establishment ofRomanitasor a
common Roman culture that was spreading East andWest and unifying the
Roman Empire into a single cultural, social, and politicalkoine.^196
(^195) See brief discussion in Rüpke (1995) 172–3. The only evidence to the contrary is the
survival of a Gallic lunar calendar in the Roman period, that will be considered in Ch. 6.
(^196) From a Roman perspective it would clearly have been preferable—for both administrative
and political reasons—for the Julian calendar itself to have been adopted in the East, just as it had
been in theWest. The failure of the Roman Empire to impose it in the East is explained by
Feeney (2007) 209–10 as partly‘areflection of the Romans’general administrative preference for
laissez-faire and subsidiarity’, but partly also a reflection of‘the way that the Roman calendar
itself continued to be a distinctive marker of Romanness’. He goes on:‘[The calendar’s] reach
was not universal: it was not meant to be a unifying grid for all the peoples of the Empire, but it
retained its specific power for Roman citizens as a context for apprehending and exploring
Roman identity. This irreducibly Romanocentric dimension of the calendar potentially enabled
any Roman anywhere in the Empire to feel part of a shared community of citizens.’Whilst
I agree entirely with thefirst‘partial’explanation (administrative laissez-faire), I must take issue
with the second. The wholesale imposition of the Julian calendar on the provinces of the Latin
West demonstrates on the part of Rome a clear intention, or at least an unambiguous consent, to
make it a universal, imperial calendar; the preservation of its specifically Roman identity, in this
context, was clearly not an issue. The failure to impose it similarly in the East must ascribed
instead to the political and cultural strength of the Greek Eastern cities and provinces and to the
consequent tenacity of their local calendrical traditions, as we shall see in the next chapter.
226 Calendars in Antiquity