The Athenian calendars are not in place to measure time, but to regulate mean-
ingful civil, religious, and interstate activity in ways that best serve the city’s inter-
ests as understood in the light of changing circumstances. The fact that their cal-
endrical systems did not do a very good job of tracking natural phenomena is of
marginal significance. It is clear that highly complex and sophisticated societies,
including international empires such as those of Athens or Republican Rome,
could operate perfectly successfully under these apparently ramshackle systems.
Before Caesar’s reform, the very idea that the calendar ought to track celestial
movements accurately could strike a Roman as almost quaint. Twenty-five years
before the reform, Cicero tells the audience of the Verrinesabout the way that
Greeks add a day or two every now and then to recalibrate their calendars, in the
way we have just observed the Athenians doing. This is, he says, a “habit of the
Sicilians and other Greeks” (consuetudo Siculorum ceterorumque Graecorum, Verr.
2.2.129); he is struck by the fact that they bother to “make their days and months
fit with the ordered pattern of the sun and moon” (quod suos dies mensesque con-
gruere uolunt cum solis lunaeque ratione).It is very revealing that a Roman in 70
b.c.e.could see the Greek calendars (to our eyes, so defective) as striving for con-
gruence with ratio,“ordered pattern”; Cicero’s language also incidentally reveals
how far it is from the Roman attitude to see such a goal as part of what the Roman
calendar should be about.
THE HARMONIES OF CAESAR’S YEAR
This whole situation changed, literally overnight, as the final, 445th, day of the
final year of the Republican calendar terminated at midnight of the final day of
December 46 b.c.e., the last time that December would not have 31 days.^130 Only
after 1 January 45 b.c.e.was it for the first time feasible in the Mediterranean world
to have the civil and natural years in harmony under the same standard of repre-
sentation. This revolution was one whose implications were immediately appre-
hended by contemporaries, for no educated Roman could fail to be impressed by
the phenomenal improvement in consistency that Caesar’s calendar represented in
comparison with the Republican calendar. Not only the novel accuracy of the
reform became apparent, but also the power that accrued to Caesar’s authority by
it.^131 Plutarch preserves a splendid joke by Cicero that brings out the realization of
the power of both the calendar and its author. When someone remarked that the
constellation of the Lyre would be rising the next day, Cicero said, “Yes, by
decree.”^132 Here the power of Caesar is seen as controlling the celestial movements
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti