Republican dates before the Caesarian reforms, as in the example of Cicero’s birth-
day just quoted, and to Julian dates for events between the Caesarian and Gregor-
ian reforms.
Anniversaries across these divides, then, are not strictly anniversaries. You have
to take your dates extremely seriously to think this is not good enough. You have
to take your dates as seriously as the Protestants of Northern Ireland, who observe
the battle of the Boyne on 12 July every year. The battle, hallowed in their tradi-
tion as the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism in Ireland, was fought in
1690, on 1 July in the Julian calendar, which was then still in force in Britain, but
the Loyalists faced a problem when the Gregorian calendar was introduced in
Britain in 1752, 170 years after the rest of Europe, because eleven days had to be
dropped.^91 The “new” 1 July was simply not acceptable as the anniversary of the
Boyne, because it would not really be the same dayin exact calculation of years and
days. The Protestants therefore kept the skipped eleven days of the 1752 reform,
on the calculation that even if the date was different — 12 July, not 1 July — the day
remained the same. Nowadays the twelfth is canonical in its own right, and they
have not kept adding an extra day roughly every century to track the original 1
July, as they strictly should: the power of the date trumps the power of the day in
the end.
In the United States people usually first meet this issue with George Washing-
ton’s birthday. He was born on 11 February 1732, when Britain and its colonies
were still using the old Julian calendar. Washington turned twenty on 11 February
1752, and then faced the question of when to celebrate his twenty-first birthday
after the eleven days were dropped between 2 and 14 September later in the year.
In the event, Washington did not celebrate his next birthday on 11 February 1753,
because that would not have been 365 days after 11 February 1752, thanks to the
missing eleven days; logically enough, he celebrated his next birthday 365 days
after his previous one, and that was on 22 February. For quite a while in the early
Republic people kept celebrating 11 February as Washington’s birthday, because
that, after all, had been the name of the day he was actually born on; but eventu-
ally the nation adopted 22 February as his “real” birthday.^92
CALIBRATING ACROSS
THE JULIAN REFORM
Issues rather similar to those facing Washington and his peers also confronted the
Romans when they were keeping track of birthdays and religious festivals after the
Calibrating across the Julian Reform. 151