“11 July,” while the eclipse of 21 June 168 b.c.e.was observed at Pydna in north-
eastern Greece on the third day before the Nones of September, that is, “3 Septem-
ber.”^118 State festivals that were notionally keyed in to seasonal events had no link
with the relevant time of year: before Caesar’s reform, says Suetonius, the calen-
dar was so disturbed “that the harvest festivals did not coincide with the summer
nor the vintage festivals with the autumn” (ut neque messium feriae aestate neque
uindemiarum autumno competerent, Jul.40.1).
We are all disposed to side with Scaliger and see the supersession of the Repub-
lican by the Julian calendar as a self-evident triumph for science and common
sense. We do so because as inhabitants of Caesar’s grid we take it for granted that
a calendar is there precisely to measure time,to create an ideal synthesis of natural
and socially or humanly organized time and in the process to capture a “time” that
is out there, waiting to be measured. In virtually all societies throughout most of
human history, however, this is not what calendars have been for, since time is not
something waiting to be measured, but the product of the operation of measure-
ment. Stern’s important study of time and calendar in ancient Judaism makes the
issues clear:
The calendar should not be perceived, necessarily, as a time-measuring scheme.
Its primary purpose, in any society, is to facilitate the co-ordination of events
and activities, and to measure the duration of activities and processes... for
instance, to determine the dates of festivals, establish the length of contracts
and agreements, etc. The calendar is fully purposeful without any underlying
notion of the time-dimension.^119The fact that all calendars operate in conjunction with either the sun or the moon
or both likewise predisposes us to feel that they are attempting to measure time, on
the post-Caesarian assumption that the relationship between the movements of
earth and sun somehow iswhat time is.^120 Yet this is not the case, as Stern again
makes clear: “The reason why the moon and sun are employed in the construction
of calendars is that their courses are universally knowable, and reasonably regular
and predictable.... The courses of the moon and sun do not have, however,
intrinsic time-measuring properties.”^121
When observing ancient societies it is natural for a modern person to feel frus-
tration that they did not have more “accurate” or “useful” calendars, yet it is the
result ultimately of a post-Caesarian frame of mind to assume that what counts in
a calendar is accuracy and that what calendars are for is to be “useful” in a sense
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti