old format of the parapegma to take account of various other cycles not covered
by Caesar’s calendar.^141 By Caesar’s time there were plenty of parapegmata in book
form, but the parapegma was still very popular in the original form from which it
took its name, as an inscription with holes into which a peg was stuck, to be moved
each day so as to keep tracking whichever cycle the inscription was concerned
with. In Greece, where the civil calendars were lunar and made no attempt to fol-
low the sun, the parapegmata concentrated on supplementing the civil calendars
with information keyed in to the annual motion of the sun, especially stellar phases
and the astrometeorological phenomena that were associated with them. In post-
Caesarian Rome and Italy, once a calendar was in place that could very success-
fully capture the solar year, parapegmata concentrated on other rhythms — local
nundinal cycles, the 29- or 30-day lunar cycle, and eventually the cycle of the
seven-day week. The parapegmata, as Lehoux puts it, are “extra-calendrical
devices used for keeping track of non-calendrical cycles,” and the cycles that inter-
est them will be precisely the ones not covered by the local calendar.^142 The new
calendar’s remarkable success in aligning the civil and solar years did not, then,
preempt the need for any other mechanisms for tracking cycles of time but pro-
vided a basis for a symbiotic relationship with the parapegmata, which very prob-
ably impinged more directly on most people ’s daily experience. The reach of the
new calendar was restricted in other respects as well. Our conceptions of utility
might lead us to imagine that the new calendar should transform itself into an
empire-wide web, but, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, such was not the
case: the diffusion of the calendar was limited and culture-specific, and many other
civil calendars remained quite happily in place for as long as the Empire lasted.
Despite these qualifications, the new Julian calendar undoubtedly had a pro-
found impact in the wide areas that it did reach. In our attempt to see what
difference the reform made to the Romans’ apprehension of time we are very for-
tunate to have a control in the form of two works by the polymath Varro. Varro
wrote two surviving works that included substantial sections on the rhythms of the
year, and it is very good luck for us that one of these sections was written imme-
diately before Caesar’s reform, and the other nine years after it.
First, Varro has a long passage on the calendar in book 6 of his work “On the
Latin Language” (De Lingua Latina);even though this work was finally published
sometime shortly after the reform, the section on the calendar is clearly written
with the Republican calendar in mind.^143 At the beginning of this portion of his
work he describes the natural divisions of the year — the year itself, months, days,
seasons (6.1 – 11). He then turns from “the division made by nature” (naturale dis-
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti