The process of adaptation to the Julian calendar was rapid in the Roman
East, but not immediate. It seems generally not to have been resisted or to have
been cause for political dissent and conflict, but some resistance and delay may
be suspected in some cases (Alexandria and Egypt, as we shall presently see),
and in some cases the calendars simply did not adapt, but instead remained
lunar until the end of Antiquity (especially in the Greek peninsula, Macedonia
and the lower Danube, and in Jewish and Samaritan communities—see
Chapter 6). Thefirst calendars to adapt to the Julian were those that were
structurally similar to it: most importantly the civil Egyptian calendar, which
only needed to add the leap year (i.e. one additional day every four years) in
order to conform to the Julian scheme (likewise the calendars of Cappadocia
and Cyprus). But the adaptation and conversion of the lunar Babylonian and
Macedonian calendars in Asia Minor and the Near East was far more radical
and, probably for that reason, delayed: we know at least that it is not before
8 BCEthat the calendar of the province of Asia was instituted.^79 The province of
Asia inscriptions suggest that this radical calendar change might never have
happened without the strong-handed initiative‘from above’of a Roman
governor, the proconsul of Asia. The adaptation to the Julian calendar was
thus not automatic or immediate, but dependent on the nature of the local
calendars as well as on local political circumstances.
Nevertheless, the fairly consistent pattern of Julian adaptation throughout
the Roman East, and more specifically, the intervention of the Roman gover-
nor in 8BCE, bring out quite clearly that these calendar changes, in spite of
their diversity, were a direct result of Roman imperial rule.^80 In broader terms,
they were also part of the general, macro-historical pattern of calendarfixation
in the great empires of later Antiquity.
The Alexandrian calendar‘Alexandrian’designates, in thehemerologia, the Egyptian civil calendar after
its adaptation to the Julian. Although it was not thefirst to adapt to the Julian
calendar–as I shall argue, the calendars of Cappadocia and Cyprus came
(^79) We do not know when the other calendars of Asia Minor and the Near Eastern coast were
Julianized, but a similar, late-1st-c.BCEdate seems reasonable. The calendar of the province of
Arabia appears to have been instituted immediately at the time of the province’s annexation in
106 CE; by then, the principle of adapting lunar calendars to the Julian had become well
established in the Near East, which explains how it could have been implemented immediately.
(^80) As Bickerman (1968) 48 implies, though perhaps too categorically:‘the imperial govern-
ment introduced the solar year [i.e. Julian calendar] slowly and, as it seems, in agreement with
the local authorities’. For a different view, see Feeney (2007) 209–10 and my comments in Ch. 4
n. 196.
Fragmentation: Babylonian and Julian Calendars 263