262 NEW YEAR'S DAY AND THE CALENDAR 



was made to reduce the excess of days in every twenty-four 

 years. Obviously the superintendence of these variations, 

 and the public declaration of the calendar for each year, 

 was a very serious and important task, affecting all kinds 

 of legal contracts. The pontiffs to whom the duty was 

 assigned abused their power for political ends, and so 

 little care had they taken to regulate the civil year and 

 keep it in coincidence with the solar year that in the time 

 of Julius Caesar the civil equinox differed from the 

 astronomical by three months, the real spring equinox 

 occurring, not at the end of what was called March by 

 the calendar, but in June ! 



Julius Caesar took the matter in hand and put things 

 into better order. He abolished all attempt to record by 

 the calendar a lunar year of twelve lunar months ; he 

 fixed the length of the civil year to agree as near as might 

 be with that of the solar year, and arbitrarily altered the 

 months ; in fact, abandoned the " lunar month " and 

 instituted the "calendar month." Thus he decreed that 

 the ordinary year should be 365 days, but that every fourth 

 year (which, for some perverse reason, we call " leap " 

 year) should have an extra day. He ordered that the 

 alternate months, from January to November inclusive, 

 should have thirty-one days and the others thirty days, 

 excepting February, which was to have in common years 

 twenty-nine, but in every fourth year (our leap year) 

 thirty. This perfectly reasonable, though arbitrary, 

 definition of the months was accompanied by the altera- 

 tion of the name of the month Quintilus to Julius, in 

 honour of the great man. Later Augustus had the name 

 of the month Sextilis altered to Augustus for his own 

 glorification, and in order to gratify his vanity a law 

 was passed taking away a day from February and putting 

 it on to August, so that August might have thirty-one 

 days as well as July, and not the inferior total of thirty 



