Tag: Roman calendar

New Year celebrations: a Roman legacy

While people around the world have been engaging in the tradition of celebrating the New Year, have you ever wondered where this custom originated from? To uncover the roots of New Year celebrations, we must (of course!) journey back to ancient Rome, where the calendar and many of the traditions we take for granted today began to take shape.

The Roman calendar initially had little resemblance to the one we use today. In its earliest form, the Roman calendar was a 10-month system that began in March, a month named after Mars, the god of war. The year ended in December, with a winter period left unaccounted for in the calendar — a gap that made the year phenomenally difficult to track. I have written before on the phenomenal mess that the Romans got themselves into with their calendar, so I shan’t re-hash it all here, but suffice to say they really did make a right old business of getting it wrong.

Back in 713 BCE, Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, introduced two additional months, Ianuarius (January) and Februarius (February), to bring the number of calendar months up to twelve. The month of January was placed at the beginning of the year and dedicated to the god Janus, making it an appropriate time for reflection and planning for the future. Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions and duality. Often depicted with two faces — one looking to the past and the other to the future — Janus symbolised the liminal space between old and new, making him the perfect patron of New Year’s celebrations. His domain included doorways (ianuae in Latin), thresholds and gateways, such as the beginning of a journey or a new phase in life.

In Roman religion, Janus was invoked at the start of any significant endeavour, whether it was the launching of a military campaign, the construction of a building or the start of the agricultural season. His presence at the beginning of the calendar year cemented the idea of looking both backward in gratitude and forward with hope. Naming the first month after Janus thus underpins the idea of the New Year as a moment for reflection and resolutions.

The start of January was a time for Romans to engage in rituals and festivities. Celebrations included exchanging gifts, such as coins or small tokens, which were thought to bring good fortune for the year ahead, and decorated laurel branches were also exchanged, symbols of prosperity and victory. The Romans adorned their homes with greenery and light candles, symbolising the hope for illumination and guidance in the coming year. Sacrifices to Janus were made, and prayers were offered for peace and prosperity. The tradition of making new year’s resolutions can trace its lineage back to this time, when Romans would pledge to improve themselves in the coming year, offering vows to Janus as part of their commitment. The Roman empire’s vast reach ensured that its calendar and traditions left a lasting imprint on the regions it governed. Even after the fall of Rome, the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, remained in use across much of Europe.

Caesar’s calendar reforms, which I discuss in my blog post on Roman calendars, was significant not only for standardising the length of the year but also for firmly establishing January as the beginning of it. This decision was partly practical and partly symbolic. By aligning the calendar with the solar year and by dedicating its beginning to Janus, Caesar reinforced the notion of January as a time for renewal. Over time, Christian Europe adopted the Julian calendar, and while some regions initially celebrated the New Year on different dates, January 1st eventually became the standard.

While many modern New Year customs have their roots in Roman practices, they have evolved over centuries and absorbed influences from various cultures and religions. For instance, the Christian Church initially resisted the celebration of January 1st as New Year’s Day, associating it with pagan rituals. However, by the Middle Ages, the Church had incorporated the date into its liturgical calendar, marking the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.

New Year’s Day stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to mark the passage of time and embrace renewal. The Romans’ choice of January, their veneration of Janus and their customs of gift-giving and reflection have profoundly shaped the way we celebrate the New Year. Though centuries have passed and cultures have changed, the essence of New Year’s traditions—hope, renewal, and connection—remains timeless.

So, as we ring in the New Year, we honour not only our aspirations for the future but also the rich tapestry of history that has brought us to this moment. In every resolution made and every toast raised, the spirit of Janus lives on, guiding us through the thresholds of time.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Julius Caesar and the longest Leap Year in history

When it came to taking charge of chaotic situations, Julius Caesar did not mess about. The stories surrounding his courage on the battlefield, his talent for strategic thinking and his downright tenacity are countless, but did you know that tackling the hopelessly disorganised Roman calendar and introducing the concept of the Leap Year was also among Caesar’s claims to fame?

Picture the scene. You’re a farmer in the 1st century BC and – according to the calendar, which circled around the ritual of state religion – you ought to be doling out ripe vegetables ready for the festivals of plenty. Yet to you and any of your slave-labourers, for whom the passage of the seasons are essential, it is clear that those harvests are months away from fruition. How did this end up happening? Well, the Roman calendar had become so out of sync with astronomical reality that annual festivals were starting to bear little resemblance to what was going on in the real world. Something had to be done.

Julius Caesar wanted to fix the mess but this was no mean feat: to shift the entire Roman empire and all its provinces onto a calendar that was properly aligned with both the rotation of Earth on its axis (one day) and its orbit of the Sun (a year). Caesar’s solution created not only the longest year in history, adding months to the calendar during that year, it also anchored the calendar to the seasons and brought us the leap year. It was a phenomenal task. We are in 46BC, otherwise known as “the year of confusion”.

Centuries prior to Caesar’s intervention, the early Roman calendar was drawn up according to the cycles of the Moon and the agricultural year. The origins of the calendar being focused on agriculture gave rise to the phenomenon of a calendar with only 10 months in it, starting in spring, with the tenth and final month of the year roughly equivalent to what we now know as December. Six of the months had 30 days, and four had 31 days, giving a total of 304 days. So what about the rest? Well, this is where it gets really weird. For the two “months” of the year when there was no work being done in the fields, those days were simply not counted. The Sun continued to rise and set but – according to the early Roman calendar, no “days” officially passed. As far back as 731BC people realised that this was a little unhinged, and King Numa, the second King of Rome tried to improve the situation by introducing two extra months to cover that dead winter period. He added 51 days to the calendar, creating what we now call January and February, and this extension brought the calendar year up to 355 days.

If you think that 355 days seems like an odd number, you’d be right. The number took its starting point from the lunar year (12 lunar months), which is 354 days long. However, due to Roman superstitions about even numbers being unlucky, an additional day was added to make a nice non-threatening 355. At the same time, and for the same reason, the months of the year were arranged in such a way that they all had odd numbers of days, except for February, which had 28. February, as a result, was considered to be unlucky and became a time during which the dead were honoured as well as a time of ritual purification.

This all looks like good progress, but it was a situation that still left the Romans around 11 days out from the Solar year and even with all the improvements made, it remained inevitable that the calendar would gradually become more and more out of sync with the seasons, which are controlled by the Earth’s position in relation to the sun. By the 2nd century BC things had got so bad that a near-total eclipse of the Sun was observed in Rome in what we would now consider to be mid-March, but it was recorded as having taken place on 11th July.

Increasingly unable to escape the problem, the College of Pontiffs in Rome resorted to inserting an additional month called Mercedonius on an ad-hoc basis to try to realign the calendar. This did not go well, since public officials tended to pop the month in whenever it suited them best politically, without sufficient focus on the goal of re-aligning the calendar with the seasons. According to Suetonius, if anything it made the situation worse: “the negligence of the Pontiffs had disordered the calendar for so long through their privilege of adding months or days at pleasure, that the harvest festivals did not come in summer nor those of the vintage in the autumn”.

During 46BC – Caesar’s year of confusion – there was already an extra Mercedonius month planned for that year. But Caesar’s Egyptian astronomical advisor Sosigenes, warned that Mercedonius wasn’t going to be enough this time and that things were getting drastic. On the astronomer’s advice, Caesar therefore added another two extra months to the year, one of 33 days and one of 34, to bring the calendar in line with the Sun. These additions created the longest year in history: 15 months, lasting 445 days. Caesar’s drastic intervention brought the calendar back in line with the seasons, meaning that the practice of the ad hoc extra month of Mercedonius could be abandoned.

Of course, getting the calendar to line up with the Sun is one thing; keeping it that way is quite another. As an astronomer, Sosigenes was well aware of the problem. The issue arises from the inconvenient fact that there aren’t a nice round number of days (i.e. Earth rotations) per year (i.e. Earth orbits of the Sun). The number of Earth rotations on each of its trips around the Sun is – I am reliably infomed – roughly 365.2421897. Hence the problem and hence the need for a leap year. The Earth fits in almost an extra quarter-turn every time it does a full orbit of the Sun. Sosigenes therefore calculated that adding an extra day every four years – in February – would help to fix the mismatch. It doesn’t completely solve the problem forever, but it was a jolly good stop-gap.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash