Turning, then, to the competing obituary notices of Augustus that come early in
the first book of Tacitus’s Annals,I discovered that one of the things some people
were amazed at was the fact that idem dies accepti quondam imperii princeps et uitae
supremus(1.9.1). Syme introduces the more natural “anniversary” in his English
adaptation; but Tacitus’s Latin simply says that the first day Augustus received
imperiumand the last day of his life were the same day, idem dies.And so they are,
the same day on the grid of the fasti, although fifty-six years removed in time, the
fifty-six years between what we call 43 b.c.e.and 14 c.e., between a nineteen-year-
old and a seventy-five-year-old.
Horace similarly activates the identity of days separated by years when he con-
gratulates Augustus on the fact that Tiberius and Drusus gained the decisive vic-
tory in their German campaign on the very day (quo die) on which Alexandria had
surrendered fifteen years earlier (Carm.4.14.34 – 38).^128 This is a mentality we per-
haps find easier to understand when it is keyed in to sacred time. When Ovid
describes 1 January in the Fasti,he says that “the fathers dedicated two temples on
this day” (sacrauere patres hac duo templa die,1.290). He does not mean that the two
temples were dedicated within the same twenty-four-hour period, for the temple
of Aesculapius was dedicated in 291 b.c.e.and that of Vediovis almost a century
later, in 194 b.c.e.; yet it is, for all that, still “the same day.”^129 This is very close to
the kind of feeling that Zerubavel describes in the case of the Sabbath: “Jews have
traditionally referred to their holiest of days as ‘theSabbath.’ Whether it fell in
April 1716 or September 1379, it has nevertheless always been regarded as one and
the same entity.”^130
The Roman apprehension of the identity of the day is particularly strong
because their calendar has the same pattern every year, undisturbed by the contin-
gencies introduced by our system of the week. For us, 12 January might be a
Tuesday this year and a Friday next; but the Romans of this period did not have a
week, so that there is not even this degree offluctuation to distract from the feel-
ing of the identity of the day. We need to buy a new calendar every year solely
because of the variations introduced by the week. If the modern world ever adopts
one of the proposed World Calendars, in which the days of the week would be
constant from year to year, then we would be much closer to the Romans’ appre-
hension that the day does not change from year to year.^131
As we have repeatedly seen, however, the assertion of identity and the very
exercise of comparison are inextricably tied up with an apprehension of difference.
The identity of the same day from year to year is always capable of being called
into question, in just the same way as the asserted identity of Roman and Greek
The “Same” Day. 159