each year ought to be 365 days after the preceding one, or occasionally 366, just as
we do;^118 but for a Roman under the Republican calendar a year could be anything
from 355 days to 378 days long, because every other year the priests were supposed
to add 22 or 23 days by inserting an intercalary month at the end of a truncated
February.^119 The Republican year, then, is a flexible unit, and it is hard to see how
they could have a highly developed sense of an invariably fixed span between one
birthday and the next, or from any one date in the year to the next.
From this point of view it perhaps looks more sensible to celebrate just the day
each month, in the Greek way, rather than an anniversary, as the Romans had done
for centuries under the Republic. But the Republican calendar’s system of notation
itself must have encouraged the feeling that the day you were born on was one that
was the same every year, and not the same every month. After all, if you are a
Greek then you can say the tenth of the month is the same every month, but it does
not work like that for the Romans. Cicero was born on what we would call the
third day of January, and what a Greek would call the third day of January, which
is what a Roman calls the third (inclusive) day before the Nones of January. In the
next month, February, the third day of the month is also the third day before the
Nones, but in March the third day of the month is the fifthday before the Nones,
because March is a long month with Nones on the seventh day, not the fifth. Your
birthday, then, was not necessarily the same day every month, but it wasthe same
day every year. The name of the day was enough to create the identity, without the
feeling that the anniversary marked the passage of an inflexible unit of time since
the last day of that name.
One of the first consequences of Caesar’s reform, however, must have been to
change this apprehension of anniversary time, since it was now possible to con-
ceive of an anniversary not just as the recurrence of a day but as the recurrence of
a day after an identical interval every year. Hinds points out how Ovid highlights
the impact of the new system in the way he describes his birthday in his autobio-
graphical poem, Tristia(4.10). Here Ovid tells us that he had an older brother,
who had been born “three times four months” before him — and on exactly the
same day (qui tribus ante quater mensibus ortus erat./Lucifer amborum natalibus affuit
idem,10 – 12). Ovid ’s brother, then, was born on 20 March 44 b.c.e., only fifteen
months after the reform, and Ovid himself on 20 March 43 b.c.e.; as Hinds well
puts it, “the 365-day coincidence of birthdays between Ovid and his brother...
constitutes one of the first true Roman anniversaries (in the modern sense) ever
documented.... Behind the special case of the two Ovidian brothers lies the larger
truth that, given the systemic irregularity in the computation of the year before 45
The Birthday as an Anniversary. 157