A dissident calendarThe Coligny inscription attests, in many ways, to the Romanization of the
Gallic calendar: as mentioned above, its public, monumental display is remi-
niscent of Romanfastiinscriptions, and itsfixed, schematic structure is likely
to have been inspired by that of the Julian calendar. The emergence of the
Gallic lunar calendar as afixed cycle is congruent with the trend we have
observed in previous chapters, where in the context of great empires, empirical
lunar calendars became increasingly standardized andfixed. The Coligny
calendar was thus part of a much broader historical process, the outcome of
the large-scale political changes that transformed the ancient world from the
mid-first millenniumBCEand through to later Antiquity.
But in spite of its overt Romanizing tendencies, the Coligny calendar
retained a strong sense of Gallic identity. This is evident not only in its use
of Celtic month and day names, but also in its lunar (or lunar-like) structure of
29 and 30-day months and intercalary months, which bore no resemblance to
the structure of the Julian calendar. Althoughfixed, indeed, the Coligny
calendar was not synchronized in any way to the Julian calendar; even the
three-letter notational scheme, which may have indicated solar events such as
solstices and equinoxes and which may have been calculated on the basis of
Julian dates, did not consistently conform to the solstice and equinox dates
of the Julian calendar.^34 The consequent impossibility of converting the dates
of this calendar into Julian dates (and vice-versa) stands in contrast to
calendars of the Roman East which, as we have seen in Chapter 5, were
designed to be easily convertible into the Julian calendar; this was achieved,
in the Roman East, by abandoning lunar structures and adopting instead
various models of the 365-day year. The Coligny calendar, by contrast,
remained at least formally lunar (albeit poorly synchronized to the moon)
and resisted the adoption of the 365-day year; in spite of its hybrid, Gallo-
Roman features, it thus remained far apart from the official calendar of the
Roman Empire. In this respect, it is appropriate to categorize this calendar as
‘dissident’. By publicly displaying a model of the Celtic calendar that bore no
structural identity or synchronicity with the Julian calendar, this monumental
inscription constituted at once a mimicry and a grand subversion of the Julian
fasti.^35
(^34) See previous note. It would have been very difficult for anyone to convert TII dates, in any
given year and at any given point of the Coligny calendar, into Julian equivalent dates.
(^35) This interpretation, inspired by post-colonial theory (see above, near n. 9), is more nuanced
than that of Duval and Pinault (1986) 399, who see in this calendar a‘sentiment de résistance aux
usages latins’, and of Monard (1999) 235–8, who proposes that the Coligny calendar was
redacted andfirst written down shortly after 46BCEas a reaction against the institution of the
Julian calendar and as an attempt to safeguard Gallic calendrical traditions. Instead of a
simplistic model of‘Romanization’and‘resistance’to it, implicit in both these works, I assume
Dissidence and Subversion 311