Awareness that the Athenian calendar in the Classical period was irregular,
mismanaged, and discrepant from the true lunar monthfinds vivid expression
in several passages of Aristophanes’comedies (latefifth centuryBCE). InThe
Peace(414–15), we are told that for a long time, the sun and the moon have
been‘stealing days and nibbling at the cycle’(of the year). This should be
interpreted as a reference to calendar disruption. More importantly, inThe
Clouds(615–26) Selene (the moon) is reported as complaining, in a rather
lengthy speech, about her appalling treatment:
(The moon) expressed her annoyance at the awful way she has been treated, after
helping you all not with mere talk but with plain action...she says that though she
does you other favours too, you don’t keep track of your dates correctly, but
scramble them topsy-turvy, so that the gods scold her, she says, every time they’re
misled about a dinner and go home having missed the festival that was specified in
the calendar.^41 Furthermore, when a sacrifice is scheduled, you’re busy armtwisting
witnesses and rendering verdicts; and time and again, when we gods are holding a
fast in mourning for Memnon or Sarpedon, you’re pouring libations and laughing.
As a result Hyperbolos, allotted this year to be Holy Recorder, was stripped of his
chaplet by the gods.^42 That way he will better understand that the days of his life
should be reckoned by the Moon (trans. Henderson 1998: 89–91).
The days are topsy-turvy, and the months are out of line with the moon; as a
result, the festivals are celebrated on the wrong days—and the politicians are
to blame. Although Aristophanes alludes, at the end, to a specific incident
(which to us remains rather obscure), his account in the rest of the passage
suggests that calendar disruption was frequent and maybe even—as Pritchett
argued—persistent.^43
(^41) ŒÆôa ºüªïí ôHí ìåæHí(‘according to the order of days’). Note that there is no specific
term in Greek (or indeed in any other ancient language) for‘calendar’in the sense of a system for
reckoning days, months, and/or year.
(^42) This obscure sentence alludes to an embarrassment that must have occurred to Hyperbo-
los, an eminent Athenian politician who—we are told here—was appointed‘to be Holy Recorder’
(ƒåæïìíÅìïíåEí); thehieromnēmōnor Holy Recorder was a delegate from Athens to the Delphic
Amphictiony, a league of states concerned with protecting the sanctuary at Delphi. Aristophanes
suggests that this was a divine reprisal for his failure to run his days according to the moon—
which implies that he had been involved (though probably not in his capacity of Holy Recorder)
in the disruption of the calendar (Gomme, Andrewes, and Dover 1945–81: iii. 713–5). Gomme
argues further that this alludes to the calendar discrepancies implicit in Thucydides 4. 118. 12,
- 1 for the year 423BCE(see above, n. 38), when this comedy was performed; see also Dover
(1968) 177. This interpretation, however, remains conjectural. On this passage, see also Pritchett
(2001) 89–90.
(^43) Dunn (1998) 228 (see also Hannah 2005: 51) argues that both these passages refer to
changes made at the time to the prytanic calendar that would have caused the prytanic year and
archontic year no longer to be conterminous. However, that these changes occurred is largely
speculative; moreover, this interpretation does not account satisfactorily for Aristophanes’
suggestion that the festivals—which were always dated according to the archontic, not the
prytanic calendar—were being celebrated on the wrong days. Hannah (2005: 51–2) suggests
alternatively that the moon’s speech inThe Cloudsrefers to an attempt to introduce a solar
Calendars of AncientGreece 35