About July and August

As summer ends, my thoughts about the months of July and August are likely different than most folks. Here is a little brain teaser to explain what I mean.

An octopus is an animal with 8 arms. An 8-sided geometric figure is called an octagon. So why is October the 10 month of the year?

A decade is 10 years. A decathlon is a sport with 10 separate events. Yet December is somehow the 12^th month of the year. Why is that? What is going on with our calendar? Who broke time as we know it?

The ancient Romans, it turns out. I only know this because I spent most of 2017 slogging my way through “SPQR” by Mary Beard, a 750 page history of ancient Rome (don’t ask why, I’m just weird like that).

When Rome ruled much of the ancient world, the calendar was originally a 10-month year. In that system, September through December were the 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th months of the year. That makes sense, or at least the names do. They use the Latin prefixes that we recognize today as part of most modern Western languages (thus a decathlon consists of 10 events, etc.).

The trouble though with the original Roman calendar was that it was lunar in nature. A month equaled a single cycle of the moon and a year equaled 355 days. As you might expect, this caused all kinds of problems. Predicting the start and end of the seasons was almost impossible. Any task dependent on an accurate accounting of when you were in time suffered great confusion. Agricultural production, maritime commerce, and military expeditions were just a few of Rome’s vital functions often thrown out of whack by the lunar scheme.

To reset their clocks to match reality, an arcane configuration of leap months was haphazardly slapped into their calendar. Every 6-8 years, 2 additional months were added to the old calendar to bring it into alignment with the seasons. But even those corrective measures often failed when politicians, mystics, and amateur mathematicians meddled in the calculations. In modern terms, it was the equivalent of an Outlook calendar created by deranged circus clowns.

In 45 BC, Julius Caesar, the first true emperor of Rome, sought to end this anarchy. He converted the Roman empire to a solar calendar model, one that is nearly identical to our modern calendar. He learned of this system in Egypt where it had already been used successfully for centuries. As emperor, Caesar was unencumbered by the Senate or anything resembling the rule of law, and therefore could modify time itself. He added 2 new permanent months to the existing Roman calendar. That bumped September through December ahead causing the prefix discrepancy.

He also modified the length of each month so that a total year equaled 365 days. The convoluted leap months were eliminated. Now only a single extra day was needed every 4 years at the end of February to make human time aligned to the seasons. That’s right, Julius Caesar invented Leap Years.

Upon the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, the 7^th month of the calendar was renamed “July” in his honor. In 27 BC, his grand-nephew Augustus Caesar became emperor. At this point you can probably guess what happened to the original name of the 8^th month. They did not even bother to wait for his death to honor him. The name was changed to “August” in 8 BC midway through the reign of Augustus.

Julius Caesar and his calendar reforms did not break time. In fact he fixed it. In doing so, he handed down to us an air-tight timekeeping system so efficient it has lasted over 2,000 years and is the norm to this day.

I have invested a lot of free time recently in working my way through “SPQR”, for good or for ill. Ancient Rome has wormed its way into a corner of my brain and I could easily write another 10 pages on the insights I’ve gained from the book (don’t worry, I won’t). The overall impression I’m left with is how much of that world still exists today, forming the cornerstone of our reality. The concepts, systems, language, ideas, and ideals of Ancient Rome permeate our modern world, and mostly without us even knowing it.

For my part at least, I doubt I’ll ever spend another September reflecting on my summer without remembering how July and August came to be in the first place.