DISCOVERY 



239 



begin to lengthen and the sun, after the winter solstice, 

 enters upon a new course, takes its name from Janus, 

 the god of doors or openings. Februum means an 

 instrument of purification, and February, the last 

 month of the year, is the month of expiation and puri- 

 fication, the Lent of the Roman year. The purpose 

 with which the calendar was first formulated was a 

 religious one. Throughout their history the Romans 

 displayed a very strong legal sense, and this trait is 

 markedly present in their religious conceptions, which 

 are of a contractual character. The early Roman 

 believed that the divine powers would treat him in 

 exact requital of his treatment of them. If he ren- 

 dered them their due at the right time and in the right 

 manner, they would be bound to repay him with the 

 appropriate blessing. On the other hand, any sin 

 of commission or omission, whether due to accident 

 or design, would inevitably have disastrous results 

 for him and for the community to which he belonged. 

 It was therefore of the first importance, both for the 

 State and for its individual members, that the spiritual 

 experts, the aristocratic college of pontifices who 

 administered religious law, should make it known upon 

 what days religious acts should be performed, and upon 

 what days it was permissible or not to transact the 

 ordinary business of life without offence to the divine 

 powers. 



In constructing their calendar, the experts had a diffi- 

 cult task. Anyone who has interested himself in 

 vulgar superstition or in the beliefs of the backward 

 races will realise that the most obvious division of time 

 longer than the day is provided by the lunar month. 

 It is easily to be observed and calculated, and with 

 its periodicity the recurrence of various reinarkable 

 physiological and natural phenomena corresponds. 

 But while the lunar month is an obvious starting- 

 point, most inconveniently it refuses to harmonise 

 with the solar year. For a people, however, whose 

 interests were primarily agricultural and pastoral, 

 the observance of the solar seasons was essential. 

 Clearly a system would not work if in time it might 

 involve the religious rites appropriate for sowing 

 being performed at a date when actually the harvest 

 was being garnered. The earlier calendar at Rome, 

 which consisted of 355 days divided into 12 lunar months, 

 in fact proved unworkable because it thus fell out 

 of harmonv with the seasons. In 450 B.C. the Romans 

 therefore adopted a Greek system which worked by 

 a cycle of four j'ears. Of these the first and third 

 remained at 355 days, to the second were added 

 22 days and to the fourth 23 days. In each case the 

 additional days were inserted after February 23. 

 This was a good deal better than the old system. In- 

 stead of falling annually short of the solar year by 

 10^ days, the calendar was now, 4 days in excess every 



four years. There was still, however, this discrepancy 

 which was arbitrarily adjusted from time to time 

 by the priestly college, who increased the confusion 

 by abusing their power of proclaiming an addition 

 to the number of days in the year for the political 

 purposes of the moment. The question of adding 

 days to the year was, in fact, decided not by the needs 

 of the calendar, but upon such considerations as whether 

 the political wire-pullers wished to postpone an event 

 or to protract the tenure of office of a particular 

 individual by the additional days.' The result was 

 naturally chaos, and, when Julius Cajsai- took the calen- 

 dar in hand, it had lost all relation to the seasons, 

 and was more than two months out of the true 

 reckoning. In 45 B.C. Julius adjusted the error and 

 established the year of 365 days with an additional day 

 every four years, the system which, with one further 

 adjustment in Western Europe, is in force to-day ." 



The schoolboy learns in his Latin grammar that 

 Roman dates are determined by their relation to one 

 of three fi.xcd points in the month, viz. the Kalends, 

 Nones, and Ides. Of these, he is told that the Kalends 

 are the first of the month, that — 



" March, July, October, May, 

 Make Nones the seventh. Ides the fifteenth- day" — 



and that in the other months the Nones fall upon the 

 fifth and the Ides upon the thirteenth. These three 

 fixed points represent the new moon, the first quarter 

 and the full moon. Upon the Kalends the pontifices 

 announced the date of the Nones for that month, 

 and upon the Nones, the first quarter, the religious 

 festivals for the month were publicly proclaimed. 

 With one exception, there were no festivals between 

 the Kalends and the Nones in any month. 



A further small point may be noticed. The Romans 

 considered that the odd numbers were lucky, and 

 the even imlucky. In consequence religious festivals 

 fall upon the odd days of the month. Where there is 

 a consecutive group of festivals the even days are left 

 blank between them, and even a single festival which 

 lasts more than one day may be held, not concurrently, 

 but upon every other day. For example, the Lemuria 

 were celebrated upon the 9th, nth, and 13th of May. 

 Before the reformed calendar of Julius Caesar, all the 

 months with the exception of February, the unlucky 

 month, contained an odd number of days. 



> For an example reference may be made to Cicero's Letters, 

 Ad Fam, viii. 6. of which a translation is given in Jean's Life 

 and Letters of Cicero, No. 35. Cicero himself was interested, 

 as the addition would have involved the prolongation of his 

 provincial governorship, which he was far from desiring. 



2 The adjustment made in England, though not without 

 some popular opposition, in a.d. 1725 corrected the existing 

 error, and provided that the century years should not count as 

 Leap Years. Eastern Europe has retained the Julian calendar 

 unaltered. 



