themselves, and since the Lyre rises on the fifth day of January according to
Caesar, Cicero was making his epochal observation when the new calendar was
not yet four days old.^133
Cicero’s joke captures very well the intuition that Caesar’s revolutionary re-
form is part of a larger revolution of systematizing and personal control in many
departments of Roman life, by which Caesar’s name and presence were made
indispensably central.^134 The reform of the calendar is the first item mentioned by
Suetonius in his catalogue of the ways in which Caesar undertook “to put the con-
dition of the state into order” (ad ordinandum rei publicae statum, Jul.40.1). It is
very attractive to see the same Caesarian regularizing and ordering urge at work
in the reform of the calendar as in his grammatical work On Analogy,which argued
for the same kind of systematizing approach to the Latin language: Caesar was
seeking a kindred harmony between nature and grammar and between nature and
the calendar.^135 Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus, and it was in this capacity that
he instituted the calendrical reform of what remained fundamentally a festival cal-
endar. The matrix of Rome ’s religious life was now being harmonized by Egyptian
and Greek science, personified by the astronomer Sosigenes who accompanied
Caesar from Alexandria and oversaw the details of the reform: the figure of the
calendar’s author was stamped on it for all time with the renaming of the month
Quintilis as Julius.^136 The full commemoration of this nexus of knowledge and
power had to wait almost another forty years, until 9 b.c.e., when Augustus set up
his remarkable horologiumcomplex on the Campus Martius.^137 This extraordinary
monument was designed to be in place for the next year, 8 b.c.e., to celebrate his
definitive recalibration of the Julian year, whose intercalation had gone awry in the
intervening years: 8 b.c.e.was also the year in which the name of Augustus took
over from the month of Sextilis.^138 Although many of the details remain contro-
versial, there is no doubt that this complex displays the power of the princepsto
control time through his mastery of foreign knowledge.^139 The gnomonof the mas-
sive sundial was provided by the first Egyptian obelisk imported to Rome; dedi-
cated to the Sun by Augustus in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus, the obelisk cast
its shadow at noon on a meridian line whose zodiacal demarcations were annotated
in Greek.^140
The new calendar, for all its accuracy in correlating the civil cycle with astro-
nomical phenomena, was still only one of a number of mechanisms available for
charting time, since the rhythms of the Roman festival calendar were not the only
ones pulsing through the life of the city and empire. The people of Rome and Italy
responded to the new calendar’s success in tracking the solar year by adapting the
The Harmonies of Caesar’s Year. 197