Roman dates and months

kev67

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I re-read about the Latin system of dates yesterday. It struck me as a clumsy system. Kalends as the first of the month sounds logical enough. Ides as half way through the month, but having it change from the 13th to 15th for four months is confusing and illogical. Nones as either the 5th or 7th is confusing too. Why is there no special day three-quarters through the month? Counting backwards from the next Kalends, Nones or Ides sounds more difficult than it should be, especially when Kalends would be in a different month.

The way the Romans count the duration of days is a bit illogical to me too. According to their system there are two days between today and tomorrow. It does explain one thing: I have often wondered why it was said that Jesus Christ rose from the dead after three days, when from sunset Friday to dawn Sunday is more like one and a half. It was not more than two days, but according to the Roman way of reckoning it was three.

I read that Julius Caesar renamed the month Quinctil as Julius and that his reform in 46BC set the year at 365 days. The Roman new year started in March. I am not sure whether it originally started at the equinox. If I were Julius Caesar I would have shortened all the existing months to 28 days, then added another month named after myself. The moon orbits the earth every 28 days, although it does not appear in the same phase until a day or two later. Still, Roman astrologers would know about that. The new month could either be 29 days long, or you could have an extra day for special religious ceremonies. Every four years you could have another special day for extra special religious ceremonies. Maybe the Romans had a thing against the number 13.
 
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Matthaeus

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I fully agree with you that this system is illogical and confusing. Btw, Sextilis was renamed to August in honor of the first Roman emperor Augustus.
 
 

CSGD

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I re-read about the Latin system of dates yesterday. It struck me as a clumsy system. Kalends as the first of the month sounds logical enough. Ides as half way through the month, but having it change from the 13th to 15th for four months is confusing and illogical. Nones as either the 5th or 7th is confusing too. Why is there no special day three-quarters through the month? Counting backwards from the next Kalends, Nones or Ides sounds more difficult than it should be, especially when Kalends would be in a different month.
I can't really answer that question specifically, but calendars generally had to do with moon cycles and were probably more thought out on the basis of astronomical observations than you would imagine. At the very least, it was not a random system made up out of nowhere; and modern societies still base their calendars on astronomic cycles.

In terms of counting backwards: we don't really have that system anymore in the same way that Romans did, but the idea of counting towards a specific target date still exists in our society. If you have a Christmas calendar, you count towards Christmas day ... It's true that you count forward, but how absurd would it be to count in reverse order? You see a similar phenomenon if you belong to a faith that features fasting for a specific number of days. Again, we may not be used to the idea of having a countdown towards a target date, but we're used to the idea of having a target date in general. It's not a huge cultural leap to measure the distance towards that date in different ways.

The way the Romans count the duration of days is a bit illogical to me too. According to their system there are two days between today and tomorrow.
That's just inclusive counting. You may like or not, but even that is not completely alien to our mindset, I think. A baby can be 0 years old before it hits its first birthday, but you would always consider that year to be the first year of its life. We have the same prejudice towards the calendar. We calculated or estimated the year in which Jesus was born, but the year zero never existed. It went straight from the year 1 BC to the year 1 AD. That's some kind of inclusive counting as well.
I suppose those examples are not perfect, but they show to some extent that the Roman perception of the calendar was at least not *completely* remote to what we can perceive nowadays if we give it some thought.

I read that Julius Caesar renamed the month Quinctil as Julius and that his reform in 46BC set the year at 365 days. The Roman new year started in March. I am not sure whether it originally started at the equinox. If I were Julius Caesar I would have shortened all the existing months to 28 days, then added another month named after myself. The moon orbits the earth every 28 days, although it does not appear in the same phase until a day or two later. Still, Roman astrologers would know about that. The new month could either be 29 days long, or you could have an extra day for special religious ceremonies. Every four years you could have another special day for extra special religious ceremonies. Maybe the Romans had a thing against the number 13.
It originally started in March, back in the days when there were only 10 months. I'm not sure if that was still the case when Caesar reformed the calendar, but I don't think so. If you shorten all months to 28 days, you run into problems with the moon cycle ... and ultimately, the word month is derived from the moon. That doesn't sound like a sensible change to me.
 

Clemens

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I would add that the primary use of the Roman calendar was not to know when your mortgage was due, or what date you want plane tickets for, but for the purpose of religious observances and astrological/divination/luckiness determinations. Religious practices, it seems to me, tend to become what appears unnecessarily complicated from a practical point of view. Compare with the pre-1970 Roman (Catholic) calendar: a significant amount of training was required for a priest to know on a given day which feast day's mass or vespers should be celebrated. Does one feast supersede the other? Do they both get celebrated? Does one get only memorialized in the celebration of the other? Or does one get moved to another day?
 

kev67

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I suppose the zodiacs would be more of a problem if you added another month than the phases of the moon. The moon is going to get out of phase anyway.

Come to think of it, if Julius Caesar had to reform the calendar because new years were getting out of sync with the seasons then the zodiacs were also getting out of sync with the new years. You could squeeze the zodiacs up a bit and squeeze another one in. That would be a daring innovation, even for Julius Caesar.
 
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kev67

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I would add that the primary use of the Roman calendar was not to know when your mortgage was due, or what date you want plane tickets for, but for the purpose of religious observances and astrological/divination/luckiness determinations. Religious practices, it seems to me, tend to become what appears unnecessarily complicated from a practical point of view. Compare with the pre-1970 Roman (Catholic) calendar: a significant amount of training was required for a priest to know on a given day which feast day's mass or vespers should be celebrated. Does one feast supersede the other? Do they both get celebrated? Does one get only memorialized in the celebration of the other? Or does one get moved to another day?
If the calendar was primarily used for religious observances, how did normal people count time? Would they say, 'I will pay you Thursday week,' or 'Let's meet at the tavern on the new moon?', or 'Take the sheep to the higher pastures when the crocuses appear''?

Regarding the Catholic calendar, I have often wondered how the date of Easter was reckoned. I suppose it is the week after Passover, which is a Jewish festival, but how is the date of Passover reckoned?
 

kev67

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Something else I noticed from reading Lingua Latina Pars II, Roma Aeterna, is that the texts often refer to years as 'Ab urbe condita', that is since Rome was founded. Is that how Romans dated the years. I seem to remember reading that it was the Venerable Bede who started dating the years A.D. Up to that point we're people still using the Roman system?
 

Clemens

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If the calendar was primarily used for religious observances, how did normal people count time? Would they say, 'I will pay you Thursday week,' or 'Let's meet at the tavern on the new moon?', or 'Take the sheep to the higher pastures when the crocuses appear''?

Regarding the Catholic calendar, I have often wondered how the date of Easter was reckoned. I suppose it is the week after Passover, which is a Jewish festival, but how is the date of Passover reckoned?
Regarding what normal people used to count time, they may well have used the Roman calendar as we understand it. My point is that the calendar wasn't primarily created to regulate everyday actions, but was created and maintained by priests for religious and ceremonial purposes.

Regarding Easter, the simple explanation is that it's the first Sunday after the first moon after the spring equinox. This is an attempt to make it correspond with Passover, which happens on the 15th of Nisan. Originally, this all probably involved determining the date of the equinox and the date of the full moon by actual astronomical observation, but for various historical reasons, including an unwillingness to rely on Jewish custom to determine the date of Easter (while still wanting it to occur near Passover), the current calendar assumes that the equinox takes place on March 21 and that the full moon occurs 14 days into the lunar cycle. In short, Christians don't determine the date of Easter every year by observation, but by a series of tables and algorithms (called the computus) which uses these assumptions. (Compare with the Islamic calendar where each month begins when the new moon is sighted.)
 
 

CSGD

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Something else I noticed from reading Lingua Latina Pars II, Roma Aeterna, is that the texts often refer to years as 'Ab urbe condita', that is since Rome was founded. Is that how Romans dated the years. I seem to remember reading that it was the Venerable Bede who started dating the years A.D. Up to that point we're people still using the Roman system?
Yes. Dating years back relative to the birth of Christ was something that was invented in the early Middle Ages.

Before that, among Romans, dating years ab urbe condita was a normal way of making a reference to a year. Another way of doing so was to refer to the people who were consuls in that year (or archons in Athens for example) ... Or in the time of the empire, you referred to the people who were consuls at the beginning of the year since everyone got to be consul in that day and age and they had a dozen each year ... so Cicerone consule would make it perfectly clear to everyone that you're talking about the year 691 AUC (or 63 BC for that matter).
 
 

CSGD

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Would they say, 'I will pay you Thursday week,'
Well, yes ... the Romans actually had names for the days of a week. My rough guess would be that they may have referred to a lot of appointments either in relation to religious festivities (which is something Christians still do to this very day btw), or in reference to market days (Nundinae); but it wasn't hard for them to express the idea of seeing somebody on a Thursday.
 

Avunculus H

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Some background and details on Caesar's cslendar reforms.
In premodern times, it was quite usual to time business like loan repayments etc. to feast days instead to calendar dates like we know them. Most people wouldn't have calendars at home, but everyone knew when the feast days were, because the priests would keep track of them, and people prepared for them and celebrated them.
 

kev67

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I still do not see why an extra month could not have been added to the year and all the months equalized to 28 days, especially if originally the Romans had ten months. Was the idea of twelve months too far embedded by then. There are vaguely 12 lunar months in a year, but as Avunculus H's link states, Julius Caear's calendar reforms abandoned pretense at sticking to a lunar schedule. I would have added a thirteenth month if I were dictator. In the spare day, the 365th, apart from any other religious ceremony, I would have sent messengers throughout the empire with notices on how to calibrate the position of the moon against the start of each month. That might be redundant and difficult to do, because you would have to take the position at the right time. It would give the priests and astrologers something to do.

Another thing I find slightly odd is the consensus that a week has seven days. In Genesis God creates the world and everything in it in six days and rests on the seventh, but the Romans did not believe in Judaism.
 
 

CSGD

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I don't know when Romans adopted the idea of having a week consisting of 7 days. As I mentioned above, they had market days every 8th day (Nundinae; every 9th day in their inclusive counting), so I think they originally had weeks that were 8 days long.
 

Avunculus H

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I still do not see why an extra month could not have been added to the year and all the months equalized to 28 days,
What looks reasonable, logical, and self-evident to you doesn't necessarily look that way to others. It seems the idea just didn't occur to them, or if anyone had that brain wave, the idea must have seemed so unusual that it didn't catch on. You may as well ask why we today still cling to a 12-and-7-based system for time measurement while everything else is base-10 (the French tried to change that somewhat after the Revolution, but it didn't stick).
 

Clemens

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I had a similar conversation once about the Islamic calendar. My coworker (non-Arab) couldn't stand that the lunar months aren't stationary vis-à-vis the solar year. "How do they know what date it really is?" I had a hard time explaining that they're not all constantly converting the Islamic date to a Gregorian one, so they're not bothered that the two calendars don't line up.
 

kev67

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What looks reasonable, logical, and self-evident to you doesn't necessarily look that way to others. It seems the idea just didn't occur to them, or if anyone had that brain wave, the idea must have seemed so unusual that it didn't catch on. You may as well ask why we today still cling to a 12-and-7-based system for time measurement while everything else is base-10 (the French tried to change that somewhat after the Revolution, but it didn't stick).
I will give the French credit for the metric system. Science and engineering is definitely a lot easier with SI units than Imperial. I hear the time system derived from the Babylonians. Using a base-10 time system would make some calculations easier. For example, energy transfer is often measured in Joules and energy consumption in kWh. If you use a 2 kW fan heater for an hour then you consume 2 kWh of electricity, but that would be 7.2 MJ. If there was a base-10 time system you could do away with one of those measures. Still, it would be even better if it was base-16, and if the units were derived from truly universal constants.

Another useful feature of a 28 day month is that there would be four weeks to each month. If I had a time machine, and also a force field, I would suggest it to Julius Caesar, although I am not sure my Latin is up to that yet. I would also visit Benjamin Franklin and tell him he had got the direction of electric current the wrong way around.
 
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Iacobinus

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Kalends as the first of the month sounds logical enough.
It is neither logical nor illogical. It is religious. Months used to start with new moons, and a specific ritual eponymous to the day, the kalendæ, was believed to have to be done with the new moon.

Ides as half way through the month, but having it change from the 13th to 15th for four months is confusing and illogical.
Idus were intended to happen at the full moon, but -just like in any other calendar- approximations had to be done, because a solar year doesn't include a full number of lunar months, and because calendars were progressively aimed at respecting, more and more, the course of the Sun.

Nones as either the 5th or 7th is confusing too.
Yet, that is the sole "logical" event: as their name suggests, nonæ always were the 9th day before the idus.

Why is there no special day three-quarters through the month?
Nobody can answer a question such as "why something doesn't exist", so the real question is: "why would it be?". What would you expect from a three-quarter through the month special day?

Counting backwards from the next Kalends, Nones or Ides sounds more difficult than it should be, especially when Kalends would be in a different month.
It isn't more difficult to count forward and backward, it is just a different starting and ending point.

The way the Romans count the duration of days is a bit illogical to me too. According to their system there are two days between today and tomorrow.
Nope... according to their system: there are two days to reach tomorrow from today: today and tomorrow. Romans count days. You count intervals of days (hence your use of "between").

I read that Julius Caesar renamed the month Quinctil as Julius and that his reform in 46BC set the year at 365 days. The Roman new year started in March. I am not sure whether it originally started at the equinox. If I were Julius Caesar I would have shortened all the existing months to 28 days, then added another month named after myself. The moon orbits the earth every 28 days, although it does not appear in the same phase until a day or two later. Still, Roman astrologers would know about that. The new month could either be 29 days long, or you could have an extra day for special religious ceremonies. Every four years you could have another special day for extra special religious ceremonies. Maybe the Romans had a thing against the number 13.
The moon orbits the earth every 27.321,661,547 days, rather than 28 days.
The perfect calendar solution is to accept to disconnect months from years, just like weeks are disconnected from months in the Gregorian calendar.

If not accepting that, I presume that labelling the Hindu calendar with latin words would had been one of the good solutions. Such as:
LUNATIONES
अमावास्या -> KALENDA
पूर्णिमा -> IDUS (s.)
शुक्ल पक्ष -> IDUS (pl.)
कृष्ण पक्ष -> KALENDÆ
चान्द्रमास -> MENSIS (12 menses : martius, aprilis, maius, junius, julius, augustus, september, october, november, december, januarius, februarius)
अधिकमास -> INTERCALARIS (12 possibiles intercalares menses : biprimus, bisecundus, bitertius, biquartus, biquintilis, bisextilis, biseptember, bisoctober, binovember, bidecember, bijanuarius, mercedonius)
तिथि -> NOCTURNUM (30 nocturna per menses) vel DIUS (30 dii per menses)

SOLATIONES
वर्ष -> ANNUS
ऋतु-> TEMPUS (6 tempora borealia : ver, hippalus, æstas, autumnus, præhiems, hiems ; 6 tempora australia : autumnus, præhiems, hiems, ver, hippalus, æstas)
राशि, सौरमास -> ZODIUM (12 zodia : piscium, ariei, tauri, geminorum, cancri, leonis, virginis, libræ, scorpionis, sagittarii, capricorni, aquarii)
अयन -> SOLSTITIUM
विषुवत् -> ÆQUINOCTIUM
दिवस -> DIURNUM (30 aut 31 diurna per zodia)

वासर, दिन -> DIES (29 aut 30 dies per menses)

SEPTIMANUS (7 dies per septimanos : dominicum, secunda, tertia, quattra, quinta, parasceue, sabbatum)

I will give the French credit for the metric system. Science and engineering is definitely a lot easier with SI units than Imperial.
Alas, they didn't made a duodecimal metric system...
 
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scrabulista

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The apparent lunar cycle is 29.5306 days. So were there intercalary days, just about every month?
Then an intercalary month every few years?
The Hebrew calendar is that way - I never heard (until now) the Roman calendar was.
 

Iacobinus

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The apparent lunar cycle is 29.5306 days. So were there intercalary days, just about every month?
Then an intercalary month every few years?
The Hebrew calendar is that way - I never heard (until now) the Roman calendar was.
There was a intercalary month, at the time it was lunisolar.
 

Gregorius Textor

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As others have said already, it's not irrational, just different. Since habits can become, as Aristotle says, a kind of "second nature", what is contrary to our habits can seem unnatural to us, and since our human nature is rational, what seems unnatural seems irrational.

Allow me to give another example that may help to make sense of the inclusive way of counting. In music, intervals between notes (pitches) are counted inclusively. For example, the interval upwards from C to E is called a "third" because it spans three notes (C, D, E); from C to F is a "fourth", from C to G is a "fifth", and from C to the next C is an "octave." I hope this helps!
 
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