of the Annunciation, comes exactly nine months before Christmas. Only with the
adoption of the Gregorian reform and the dropping of eleven days from the year 1752
did Britain and the colonies move the beginning of the year to 1 January. To avoid the
bookkeeping chaos, however, that would have followed having a financial year of only
354 days in 1752, Parliament decided to keep the beginning of the financial year 365
days from 25 March 1752; in 1753, allowing for the eleven days dropped between 2 Sep-
tember and 14 September 1752, the 365th day from 25 March 1752 fell on 6 April. Hence
the reason why the British tax year still runs from 6 April to 5 April.
Ovid affects to convey a little envy of Lucretius, who had been able to begin
his didactic poem with a splendid evocation of spring: cf. P. Hardie 1991, 50 n. 6.
A. Barchiesi 1997, 63.
Hinds 1992, 121 – 24.
Such are the “paratactic” effects analyzed by A. Barchiesi (1997, esp. 70 – 78).
Newlands 1995, 50: “In the opening couplet of the poem Ovid introduces two
different temporal codes: the artificial and the natural.” As emerges from her discus-
sion, the “artificial” is fundamentally Roman, and the “natural” is fundamentally
Greek.
Cf. pp. 127 – 28 above.
See Farrell 2001, 24 – 25, for the Romans’ persistent representation of “the
Greek” as a natural ground.
Buchner 1982, 63 – 66 (with plates), 96 – 103, 107 – 12.
So much so that the Greek annotation of the end of the Etesian winds is copied
over, despite the fact that “it is irrelevant to the western Mediterranean” (Hannah 2005,
129).
“We are probably to imagine the husbandman marking offthe age of the moon
by moving a peg every day in a parapegma” (Mynors 1990, 62). Lehoux (forthcoming),
chap. 2, describes Virgil as following a Greek lunar calendar here. Compare the obser-
vation of D. West (2002, 193) on Phidyle ’s prayer to the new moon in Hor. Carm.
3.23.1 – 2: “The farmer does not bother with the Roman Kalends, which tend to be out
of kilter with the moons. He or she goes by the farmer’s calendar.”
See R. F. Thomas 1988 and Mynors 1990 on 1.217 – 18, candidus auratis aperit
cum cornibus annum/Taurus.
Mynors 1990, 76.
See Gell 1992, 89, for the continued popularity of farming almanacs (the mod-
ern parapegmata) among modern peasants: “These documents, whose stipulations are
more honoured in the breach than the observance... none the less epitomize the
essential — temporal — form of the farmer’s predicament, offering a magical surrogate
for control over time and chance which the peasant, always on the horns of some plan-
ning dilemma, never has.”
notes to pages 204 – 207